 |
The day "D". Cassie, Lady and the other dogs in the Vlada Vrastil‘s sled ran on 24th January. The first stage 60km long was fabuously mastered by our team! After that day, the next most important thing is to get your dogs to the starting point again. And we did. January the 25th they ran another stage, long 55km followed by a mandatory 4hours break. After that break another 35 km to run to get to the finish of the second stage! Unfortunately, despite the dog’s readiness, our team was eliminated as well as many others in this race. They reached the checkpoint about 20 minutes later than the rules were allowing. To this day I don’t understand this rule and never will, as each team had totally different time to get to the Control point! Whoever started their run at 10 o‘clock on the morning had about an hour of extra time. Than the others started their run at 11am, for example our team. So as a result, paradoxically, on the end teams with a better average time were eliminated and those with worse average time but earlier start stayed in competition! |
| |
This rule is absolutely incomprehensible for me! In addition, we all know that malamutes are great on long runs but they do not excel with an extra speed! I think this race is not about the speed! At least not for us who value the romance of Northerners. The whole race wasn’t about winning, but the race was about experiencing it all, about getting the dogs to the finish, if they‘ve managed. We gave everything to the preparation including training them and we were not the only team who ended up like this. It really does take a lot of enthusiasm and good mood out of you. The six-month preparation came to naught! The person who organizes the race has the right to set conditions as he likes, but in my opinion all competitors should have the same conditions for fairness, ie. Everyone should have the same time to reach checkpoint. The organizer determines STARTing time of the run for each team, where the later launching teams should not be disadvantaged!!!! |
