Sat. July 23 Morning temp 63F.

The dogs are getting accustomed to the Mounds Dog Power ration.

The poop isn't as hard as I'd like but at least there are individual terds rather than a pile.

We did some training runs a couple of weeks ago when the morning temps were in the 50's.

I was disappointed with Jack in lead. Looks like he's never been run up front. I was very happy

with Krusty, though. He ran with Nugget like he belonged there. It was only his second time. the first time he turned the team around and headed home!

The ad for handlers has turned up a fellow in Green Bay that wants to help run a team. I hope this works out good.

Andrew Cesario has offered to let me use his cabin in the UP to train this winter. This is a wonderful opportunity.

I am taking a permanent job with US Cellular. I think there will be enough time off to train, and they are letting me

take a month leave without pay to run the race.

Sat Aug 27. Morning temp 64 Heart attack on Aug 15.

We went horseback riding and Friday night during stall chores broke out in cold sweat and felt like sh**. Took 2 Ibuprofen and sat down for a while. Started feeling better and resumed beer drinking and card playing that night. Sunday did a 6-hour ride and that night kept waking up every 45 minutes until at 03:00 decided to get up. Felt lousy again with the same cold sweat but this time took 2 aspirin and it didn’t get better. We looked for my first aid kit, which contained nitroglycerine and finally found it in the dog box. Took one and didn’t feel better so we went to the hospital.

Took 2 more on the way and by the time we got to the E.R. I was groaning about how I felt but no real chest pain. They found my blood pressure was low so didn’t give me nitroglycerine pills but instead started giving it I.V. The cardiac enzymes were elevated, indication of dead heart muscle. By 06:00 I was in the cath lab where they opened the circumflex branch of the left coronary artery, which was 100% blocked. A stent was placed to reinforce the repair. I recovered well and on Wednesday they opened up the anterior descending branch, which was 80% blocked. The echocardiogram showed a 60% ejection fraction after the attack. Normal range is 55-70%. This means that despite some muscle death my heart is still working pretty good. I went back to work on the 24^th, and started cardiac rehab this week. Things are going well. The doctors have told me that the heart attack should not prevent me from running the Iditarod this year. I did miss some excellent training weather this week, though. I decided I should not jeopardize my health by overdoing it. Besides I still tire easily because of the healing process. I plan to start training the dogs again when the bruising at the catheterization site in my groin area goes away. I have a lifting restriction of 15 pounds for another week or so. My son Brian has been doing the dog chores for me until I can do more without violating doctors’ orders. I got 2 more female dogs from Benny Stamm. One of them, Tinker is from the same litter as Rinkyann and Scrappy. Neither has run the Iditarod with him, but he says they are good dogs. If they are as good as Rinkyann, they will make it on my team. Janie Brischke bought me a copy of Gary Paulson’s book Winterdance for me to read while I’m recovering. It makes for good reading while I look forward to my own Iditarod adventures. “A dream, a team, and a horizon”

Sat Sept 10 Morning temp 67F.

Training is going OK. We have had mostly cool mornings the last 2 weeks ( under 60F ). I’ve only missed 2 days. We’re up to running 6 miles and have logged about 35 miles in total. I’m running a 10/12 dog team every day, so each of the 22 dogs runs every other day. I’ll be changing this soon and going to a bigger team to run 2 on and one off. Last Monday I came home from work to find there were 2 dog fights. I think Nugget is in heat, which probably sparked the trouble. Ebony had a pretty big cut on his right arm. He was in a fight with Mickey, who only got a puncture on his muzzle. Jack and Stubs got into it too, and Jack has a big tear on his ear and a tooth puncture in his rump. Stubs got cut inside his mouth and his nose is cut. I stapled Ebony’s 3 inch gash, mostly to help keep it clean, since it had been several hours before I found him and the skin had already devitalized at the wound margins. Today it looks like a spot about 1x2 cm will slough off and scab up. Hopefully he won’t lose too much hair as it heals. Bony and Stubs are on antibiotics. Hopefully the other two will heal up all right without drugs. So Stubs and Bony have missed the last 3 runs. The next 3 days are forecast to have overnight lows in the lower seventies to upper sixties, so we won’t be able to do much. By Wednesday when it cools off again the team should be back to full strength.

I need meat in the diet. With high diesel prices we’ll opt for a shorter haul to Red Granite for greyhound beef. Even though the meat prices are higher, it will be cheaper because of the distance and we can make the 2-hour trip without too much thawing even at 70 degrees. I’ll make the run Monday or Tuesday before work instead of running a team. They open at 7 A.M. so I’ll leave here at 4:30. If I make good time I can unload 1500 pounds of meat and get to work by 9:30. My friend Rory has found me a source of fishmeal at the Portage feed mill. Hopefully they can get me some powdered eggs too.

I still tire easily, and going to cardiac rehab 3 times a week makes for a tight schedule. Since I still don’t have any sick leave I have to work extra hours to make up for the time I spend at the hospital. I sure appreciate all the sympathy calls I got from my mushing friends. Seems that news about kindred spirits travels fast. On the bright side the diet and exercise program is aligned with my fitness and weight reduction goals. This morning I tipped the scales at 200. I’m down 13 pounds since May. Only 20 more pounds to go!

It’s going to reach 90 degrees today and tomorrow, so I will be catching up on paperwork. I still haven’t filed my income tax return. It was due on the day I had my heart attack so I had to file another extension. The plan for this week is to file taxes and close on the sale of my house in Sun Prairie which I bought 2 years ago to finance the Iditarod race. After that I will start going up north on weekends to train.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the last chapter in Winderdance the first time I read it. This time the last chapter about his heart attack really got my attention. I’m looking forward to meeting Gary Paulsen at the race. We share a sense of the spirituality related to mushing dogs. I long for that trance like state where my spirit is projected out in front of the team. In Dogsong Gary says “The dogs go out in front of the man and the man goes out in front of the dogs.” I watched The Matrix again last night just to see the part where Morphius tells Neo “It’s the difference between knowing the path and walking the path”. That’s what running the Iditarod is about for me.

Sun Sept 18 Morning Temp 59F.

Last Sunday my training run was interrupted by a visit from an unhappy neighbor. It seems that the cacophony of hooking up dogs gets his dogs barking which wakes up his kids. He is tired of “putting up with all the noise”. Well I can’t say it was a big surprise as my dogs were totally out of control during the hookups. I decided that it’s time to train them to be quiet and a LOT less enthusiastic during hookups. I had been trying to just let them stand there and go nuts until they stopped. Well it was a good theory but it didn’t work. On Wednesday it got cool enough to run again so I hitched them up in the evening (part of the neighbor’s objection was the time of day). I ordered 10 bark-training collars to outfit the dogs left behind but they haven’t arrived yet. In the meantime I’m determined to have a silent hookup. I had to get pretty heavy-handed with some of the more boisterous dogs that first night, but I prevailed and we had a silent start! This weekend we ramped up the training partly to make training runs less fun to therefore quell the barking and partly to get miles on more quickly. I have divided the 22 dogs into 3 groups of 7-7-8 dogs each and run each group in all combinations. So I’m running each dog 2 days on with one day of rest in between. On the days I run a fifteen dog team I hook up 3 leaders instead of only two to keep the length of the team down. It gets hard to turn the team around and it’s dangerous at intersections where I can’t see. I have to go up with the leaders and check for traffic and then run back about 80 feet to release the brake and get them clear of traffic. Once the corn is harvested there is only one of these intersections to contend with. Having 3 dogs in lead helps get more leadership experience too. I can put one good solid leader up there and the other two tend to copy.

We’re up to 8 mile runs now. Last night we left at 8:00 P.M. as it was getting dark and the temperature was 72F. It had only dropped to 66 by the time we returned. It’s dicey to run the dogs in these warm temperatures. I put my 5 gallon water jug in the freezer with about 1.5 gallons in it so that the water I put on top gets ice cold by the time we hit the trail. I don’t feed baited water before we run, but rather stop about every half-mile to let them take a tongue bath in icy water. Having plenty of cold water is the only way to cool a dog down if they get heat exhaustion. My job as the musher is to always be alert to hyperthermia and stop the team often enough to let them pant and cool down. If I can’t see any steam coming off of them, it’s too hot to run. I want to make sure the evaporative cooling system of the canine is able to work. Mostly there’s high humidity now that actually works to my advantage. In the morning and evening as the temperature drops we reach the dew point and the tall grass along the roadway gets wet. This really helps cool the dogs down and once their under parts get wet they can conduct heat into the ground by laying down. Watching their tongues is the best gauge of their heat tolerance. If they are sweating and dripping, it’s time to stop. They also get a flaring of the tip of the tongue making it really long and spoon-shaped. I stop until Scrappy starts barking to go and the tongues are going back into their mouths. I couldn’t run this hot with young dogs. The team is all over 3 years old. The younger dogs are just too enthusiastic and need to be introduced to running when it’s warm gradually. I wouldn’t run youngsters when it’s over about 50-55 degrees.

I have a young girl coming over after school to help with chores. She loves the dogs and her folks like the responsibility it teaches her. This week we’re going to start having Susan feed the dogs after school so I can run them later at night and not have to stay up too late afterwards feeding them. I sure appreciate her help and her parents hauling her back and forth every night.

I talked to Steve Rasmussen today asking for advice on sleds. He owns an Alyeska like mine and I was trying to decide if I should chance running this sled or not. He convinced me not to try it. So I’ll be ordering a new Prarie-Bilt sled for the race. Yesterday I bought a 20 foot cargo trailer for hauling gear to Alaska. Hope it arrives in time for the Button Box run next month. It’s over 8 feet wide so two ATV’s can fit side by side inside. It has a ramp-style rear door, fully insulated with a spare tire, and auxiliary battery. I got an extra-long tongue because the dog box on my truck is cantilevered past the flat bed by fourteen inches. I’ll have to redo the outrigger setup in the rear for the 400-pound tongue weight of the trailer. My plan is to set this up with a couple of bunks and store all my dog equipment in it. This will be home for ATVS, snowmobiles and I should be able to put sleds in the trailer instead of on top of the dog box. It’ll cost more to haul, but save 3 to 4 hours every weekend of setup and teardown time. This should allow me to haul meat in the summertime without getting home with a big thawing mess. I can put a couple of crates in to hold the excess dogs we’re training now. My dog box only holds 20.

I took the staples out of Ebony’s arm after ten days and the wound is looking pretty good. It closed up better than I had anticipated. Jack’s got a notched ear now. I hope it gets enough fur to keep it from getting frostbite. Ranger has developed a harness rub already. I’ll have to rotate him into different harnesses and make him run on he other side of the gang line until the swelling goes down and the fur comes back. I’ll need to buy new harnesses this season for everybody. I need to start checking the dogs over more carefully after each run to catch these little problems and treat them promptly. Running on grass along the roadside is good for the feet they get toughened up more gradually than if we were on gravel. I do have to start paying attention to feet, though, since we get on the pavement for a ways on every run.

Sat Sep 24 morning temp 55F.

Weather has been warm this week highs in upper 80’s and lows in the 70’s. I missed running the dogs Mon-Thurs. Drove to buy meat Monday morning and learned after I arrived they had called to let me know they couldn’t fill my order. Got up at 04:00 and spent $60 on fuel for nothing. Stopped at feed mill and bought 2 bags of fishmeal. Better than nothing I guess. There’s a shortage in the meat supply because the weather has been so hot that a lot of the animals picked up by stock removal companies have decomposed too quickly to be used for dog food. I had a good 10-mile run this morning. The miles should add up more quickly as the temperatures drop. Ten milers should start only taking a couple hours once we get down below 50 degrees. I had good success keeping dogs quiet this week. The bark training collars came so I’m putting them on the dogs I leave in the dog yard. If I go too many days between runs they tend to fall into the old habit of raising a big commotion. I stopped and asked my neighbor how I was doing at keeping the noise down and he said I am doing well. I wonder if he knows I didn’t run them most of the week. He admitted that it’s mostly Sunday morning that the commotion gets to him. I looked back at my records, and so far this is better than I’ve ever done getting miles on the team. I’m a week ahead of my 2003 season for mileage. I’m going tomorrow to pick up a 1200-pound load of chicken. Hopefully it will cool off enough to run them in the morning before I go. Closed on the sale of Sun Prairie house OK. Should have enough money to run the race and pay for my son Brian’s college this year. At least I have paid-off credit cards to start the money burning with. Ranger’s harness rub is healing up OK, but he still has a thickened callus where the traces ride in the armpit. Three of the females are in heat; Pepper, Wonder, and Nugget. We had a dogfight again between Jack and Stubs but Brenda ran out and broke it up with the shovel before any serious damage was done. Jack’s notch got bit off, probably for the better. Now I won’t worry so much about it getting frostbitten. Next week I plan to have Jack neutered. I would have done it already if I hadn’t been laid off work all summer. My policy is to neuter all dogs and pay stud service if I want to breed. These three have reminded me why I set the policy. I may still have all 3 cut despite the need to lay them off for a week or more to heal up.

Tue Nov 1 Morning temp 35F

I graduate from cardiac rehab tomorrow. I’m feeling OK. Still get fatigued more than I think I ought to but this is gradually improving. I exercise every day and get off the ATV and jog alongside whenever the team slows down enough for me to keep up. I still haven’t lost much weight, though at about 200 pounds. I’m doing the Pilates ball thing to strengthen core and improve balance. I walk or do 10 sets of 4 stories of stairs at work every day. I missed 8 days training in October between commitments and weather. Unusually warm temperatures again. October averaged 2 degrees higher than normal. I cancelled my Button Box outing with Jamie Nelson and the mushing boot camp group. Just wasn’t prepared to do it without stressing out in a big way. This kind of stress is not good for the heart. Also diesel fuel is $100 per tank so the trip to Togo, MN. would have cost $300. Instead I took the 2 days off work and ran my dogs hard at home. We put on about 80 miles in the 4 days. Teams have about 300 miles in training at this point so we’re keeping a good training schedule. Some minor injuries; Mickey was limping a bit but I couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong. He was laid off a few days and seems fine now. Pepper and RinkyAnn got into a fight and Pepper has a bite under the chin and a sore front paw. Ranger has a rear middle toe that he must have scraped on the highway while turning the team around, so I have to put a bootie on to get it healing. Ace has harness rubs under both armpits. I tried putting him in a different size harness that didn’t fit. We’re in a bit of a slump attitude wise, probably because the runs are 10-20 miles every day over the same route. Will go up north this weekend to run dogs and the Langlade County Sled Dog Club is putting on a rabies clinic, so I’ll get the shots up to date. I wormed the dogs with Fenbenzadole so I will follow up again this weekend with another 3 day dose. This drug kills hook and whip worms and everything else but tape worms. I used 3 290 gram tubes that cost $42.00 each. I have managed to get quiet hookups! It is nice to be able to leave real early in the morning without worrying about waking up the whole neighborhood. Had a little accident on Sunday. We went right at a stop sign and Jack figured he could cut inside the stop sign post. It broke the 5/8 inch brass snap on his neckline and broke the post off at the ground. I don’t know if Jack was even phased. He has a sort of bulldozer personality. This was at state agricultural research station, so I stopped and confessed that I would re-set the post. No hard feelings. The sheep have gotten used to us going by and now they chase the team along the fence line as we go by. Small pleasures. The dog poop is often frozen in the morning now. The 5 gallon pail empties with a lot less mess when the terds are frozen. It just about cuts the cleanup time in half. A sign that my luck has improved. A state patrol squadcar went by me running my dogs this morning with the ATV along the roadway and didn’t stop me.