February 14

Happy Vanlentine’s Day to all of you!!!

Woke up to a relatively mild day at 14 degrees and decided to train right away since the trail was groomed yesterday and had time enough and cool enough to set up as good as it was going to get.  Hermel sail that he had only done ½ of the width of the trail but it looked good except for some corners/overlaps that were 2 feet deep.  We also had a bit of fresh snow this morning so there was 2 inches of fluff on the trail.  The 2 teams did good and we were following the new approach to training and letting them rest/have fun 3 times in the 5 mile run – for the first time in a long time I didn’t feel like I was getting frostbite on my face!  We also are trying to get them more fluids by freezing up some 2 inch thick squares of dog soup water that a lot of them seem more willing to drink/eat.  Everybody (except Oslo who is complaining of some unknown problem) ran really good!!!  So a good training day!

That training day wasn’t quite as good for the people = I have been fighting with some back pain (this is different than the injury I got last March from loading a dog and different from the injury I discovered on Xray in December which is a compression fracture in the middle of my upper back)  This was an aggravation of  a fall at Nicolet on the slippery ramp loading dogs after the race and loading dogs into the cages and bending wrong – this one was supremely screwed up………….we were loading the dogs back in and I swung the lower dog door closed with my foot, hooked my lace in the closed latch and wiped out in the trailer – hasn’t been really good the last 4 days – have been taking a Canadian available med of Tylenol with methocarbimal (an over the counter muscle relaxer) and that seems to help some – now I am thinking of buying another over the counter med topical Voltaren -  to see if that might help .  I am feeling a bit fragile since I have known I have a compression fracture from osteoporosis (even though they could not tell from xray how old it was) – yesterday I thought I was cured from all problems but training today made it come back.

Just got a message from Melanie asking us for dinner for Valentine’s Day!!  Tell you all about it tomorrow!