Off-Season Sled Dog Training

For most of us, thoughts of the Beargrease sled dog marathon don't cross our minds while the leaves are still on the trees, but that's not the case for the mushers. "It's a three hundred and sixty five day a year job. If we could fit 500 days in the year we would do that because there's that much work," said John Stetson, a Beargrease sled dog racer. John Stetson has all the responsibilities of a farmer in his career as a sled dog racer, and all the pressure of a coach training a professional team. "I am a coach, that's what I do. I coach and I train the dogs and I build them up."

Juliet Homme, an Outdoor Recreation major at UMD, is now helping john build his team up from little pups. "It's fun to race them and see who finishes first and you kind of get to predict who's going to be a really good runner," said Homme. "I have four puppies there of this last litter. I'll be lucky if one of those puppies, twenty five percent can make my NFL team, my veteran team," said Stetson. NFL team? You heard right, Stetson uses a football analogy to describe his 50 dogs. "The little puppies here they're Pop Warner. Then we go to the team that Juliet's training, that's yearlings, and that's like highschool, college. And then my team is the NFL," desbribed Stetson.

In the Fall, Stetson's team is in full on training mode. The fall training consists of running in front of a four wheeler, it's weight training for the dogs, low gears and slow speeds. "I have at least four or five hours a day just training training dogs and that's at this time of year. Later on, when we have to start doing long runs, it's eight hours a day of training," said Stetson.

The same adage that applies to the human athletes, applies to the dogs. "It's not just about athletic ability, it's about desire, and they're breed to do it. They all are crazy about sleds," explained Stetson.

And like the best coaches of championship teams, Stetson directs all the credit back to his athletes. "When we're starting the race when you go down the shoot people are excited and it's not because some man's driving a dog team it's because of the dogs, the dogs are absolutely amazing," said Stetson.