Food drops are upon us. We are busy stockpiling all the necessary supplies and preparing them to be shipped out onto the trail. We are going to send out nearly 2,000 lbs. of frozen, sliced meats to the eighteen checkpoints. This is well over twice the amount that will actually be used, but we want to be prepared; we never want our schedule to be altered due to a lack of supplies, so we send out extra.

I have sorted out the core of my Jr. Iditarod team from the rest of our racing team, and I have started to alter their training. I am opting for shorter runs so I can keep my speed up. I know my dogs are tough enough to complete the race course in a competitive fashion but I would like to boost their speed as much as possible during these last few weeks of training. Today my dad and Dallas, my younger brother who is also training for the Jr. Iditarod, took their main dogs out on an 80-mile overnight camping trip. Meanwhile, I did a 30-mile trip. Although I really do enjoy the long camping trips, I kind of felt sorry for them; it rained all night and I know the cabin leaks...

Now that they have completed this trip, we are going to limit the dogs to mostly short runs and concentrate our energies on getting all the dogs "fat n’ happy" before the big race. We also need to spend our time focusing on the small details, like where are we going to get the Halogen headlamp bulbs from, or how about the lithium batteries to power the headlamps?.