Friday, February 10

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Thursday was a big training day for the Bellerives – I think Hermel and another guy here to help him and Randy helping as well took out all 4 of their teams – so that would be about 50 dogs – and 200 boots!!!!!!  Cause they boot them all for training!!!!  I went in the bathroom of the barn this morning and all the used booties are on the floor (it’s the warmest spot in the barn) drying – it looks like a bootie graveyard! 

We trained the “A” team of 10 and went 9 miles – they did well and seemed to be very happy with themselves.  We are trying a new approach to training that was suggested by Alan Forget – it is mostly to do with having the dogs out on the trail for the length of time you  predict it will take the fastest teams to complete the  upcoming race – so even if you don’t train the same number of miles, you spend that amount of time out on the training trail – even if that means stopping and giving “attaboys” for 10 minutes at a time – which we did yesterday.  There is a race here in Quebec this weekend, but it seems that Laconia, NH is getting enough snow to have the race the weekend of 2/17-18 and 19 so we are skipping the race here (as are the Bellerives) in preparation of doing the 3 day race in New Hampshire.  Right now our training schedule looks like today, Sunday and next Tuesday – subject to change without notice (as Randy frequently likes to say).  It is bitter cold here today at 2degrees with wind but sunny.  I am not looking forward to the training this afternoon but I guess it wasn’t so bad yesterday at 8degrees…………I just bundle up and have every body surface covered with at least 2, more often 4 , layers!  All you can see is the tip of my nose, if that!!!

After training we got the truck back with a new starter.  They determined that the internal ground on the old one was bad and got a new one (re-built) and put an additional ground on it.  It sure is nice to be able to have Claude’s business’ mechanics look at the truck and know where to get the parts to fix it!!!!  We have been in Quebec and other places in the US (including Alaska and Alberta and Saskatchawan and Manitoba…………shall I go on??) where we were broke down with no way to get the problem somewhere to be fixed!!!!  So this is like a “dream” situation!!!

Bellerives invited us out to dinner at the local restaurant “Les Villageous” even though Claude had some dental work done yesterday and could only eat liquids!  Melanie and Patrick are on a “paleo” type diet, we are on our lowfat, low sugar diet and Ranelle was the only one without restrictions!!!

Well now that we have the truck back maybe I can talk Randy into going shopping again!!!!