Dog Psychology

September 30, 2001

Snowcrest Racing Sled Dogs--Jim Gallea

    One of the things that mushers constantly think about, practice, observe, and discuss is dog psychology.  Sled dogs are amazing.  They are extremely friendly, sociable animals who love being around people and fellow dogs.  The dogs love to run, and they love to please those who take care of them and earn their trust.  

   All athletes have in common the need to keep a positive attitude during athletic events. As with most things in life, performance is at its peak when a positive, fun attitude is maintained.  For sled dogs, running the Iditarod is no different.  The more fun that they have, and the better their attitudes, the better the team performs.  As a result, one of the major challenges that we mushers face is to keep the dogs in a good attitude.

    As a musher on the trail, the responsibility of keeping the dogs in good humor is my responsibility.  The dogs are very perceptive, and if the musher on the back of the sled is not in a good mood, then the dogs will pick up on that mood.  No one wants to work for a crabby boss.

 Along with needing to keep a positive attitude, the musher also must be very good at "reading" the dogs.  When are the dogs "in the groove" and doing just fine?  When are the dogs getting a bit tired and need a rest soon?  When are the dogs acting tired, but really just sort of bored and not all that tired?  The only way to be able to answer these questions is to know your dogs, and if the dogs are getting tired and need a rest, the very best thing to do to keep a competitive advantage in the race is to take a rest.

    Another important contributor to the dogs' positive attitudes is their training.  As the dogs are building strength, speed, flexibility, and endurance during the next several months leading up to the Iditarod, they will also be building mental toughness.  Mental toughness is the ability to continue on and perform at peak levels despite fatigue, soreness, or even boredom.  Anyone who has ever jogged before knows that you reach a point where you are tired and would like to slow down or stop, but that you actually still have a lot of energy and physically you can keep going; it's just that the tired feeling is more MENTAL.

    In human terms, the best example of mental toughness that I know of is a good friend of mine named Joe Meng.  Joe is a fellow student studying human biology and pre-dental medicine at the University of Montana.  Joe is from northwestern Wisconsin, where the American Birkebeiner 50K cross country ski race is held every year, and he has completed the "Birkie" twice.  When he skied in his second race, he did it while we were in the middle of a 21-credit semester at UM.  He had no time to train in between lectures, chemistry labs, and long, late-night study sessions, so he did a 25K ski race literally with no training at all, and three weeks later flew home to Wisconsin for the weekend to race the Birkie.  I asked Joe how he was able to ski for 30 miles after only doing one 15-mile training event and no other training.  Wasn't he exhausted?  Joe said, "After the first 5K, I felt I had received a thorough workout, and I was ready to be done."  But he made it to the finish line.  He wasn't first, but he did it.  Can you ski 30 miles with nothing for training but a lot of organic chemistry student-preps and NMR spectroscopy--(Okay, well...Waali)???

    Of course, for the dogs, they aren't going to run the Iditarod without lots of training, but the dogs need Joe's type of mental toughness in order to be able to keep their attitudes up when it's crunch time on the Bering Sea Coast. 

    For example, some times the dogs get a bit bored with a monotonous stretch of trail, and they slow down.  During my first Iditarod, my dogs and I were climbing one of the last hills leading to Topkok hill, a major landmark for mushers on the Bering Sea Coast only about 50 miles from Nome.  They were going a little bit slow, but I figured that they were just having to pull a little harder due to the snow conditions on the coastal hills.  However, when the dogs got wind of a herd of caribou that had passed over the hills just before we did, we took off "like a shot" and finished our ascent of the hill in no time.  The dogs simply needed something to spark their interest--they were a little bored.  

    This is where the mental toughness training can be a big asset to a dog team.  If a mentally tough dog team doesn't get bored while traveling on the 150-mile long Yukon River, that team will travel one or two miles an hour faster than teams that aren't as mentally tough.  That can mean the difference between 1st place and 5th place.

    So where is the training update in all of this? 

    Besides focusing on heavy pulling to build the dogs' muscles, the heavy pulling helps to build the dogs' focus on running.  Even when they are going two miles an hour, as they did up one hill on a recent training run, the dogs must be focused entirely on their job as sled dogs.  This is a big part of our training now because we want to build these type of good habits into the dogs' psyche as early in training as possible.  By having the dogs pull against heavy loads and lots of resistance, they are learning that there is a time for playing around and watching the birds fly overhead, but that there is also a time for total and complete focus on pulling.  If every dog in my team didn't focus entirely on pulling, they wouldn't be able to make it to the top of that hill (see picture).  This builds mental toughness and mental discipline.  This is where we can start to put ourselves above the competition.

    Of course, it is also important to stress that the dogs got to take a rest stop a few minutes after we crested the top of that hill, and that I jumped around like crazy playing with the dogs, encouraging them, and patting them on their heads.  We always have fun, even when we are focused on the top of Topkok hill and the finish comes into view some 50 miles distant.