Jeff King wonders if he’s hit on another strategy to gain an edge.
KASILOF, Alaska — Ask Jeff King how his summer is going after winning the Iditarod and he might just say, “Swimmingly.”
The four-time champion from Denali Park, Alaska, is hardly resting on his laurels after out-racing his main rival in 2006, Doug Swingley of Lincoln, Mont., and 82 other dog teams.
Using a couple of boats with brand-new outboards, some rope, fishing buoys and some canine flotation vests, King has instituted a program of offseason exercise to keep his 30 top racing dogs in peak shape during the hottest time of year, when most sled dogs are losing muscle tone. It’s too hot to run them, so King’s dogs are swimming laps around Goose Lake, the scenic pond near his house.
“I’ve never been more suspicious that I’ve found something that will give me an edge that is more than an edge,” he said in late July. “If the correlation between conditioning for humans and dogs works out the way I think it will … y’know, I’m very excited about it.”
For a guy who has made a habit out of successfully reinventing the mechanics of distance sled dog racing over the past few years, it is no surprise that King is at it again. He has redesigned the dog sled; redone the harness and towline system; even come up with a gel-fueled heated handlebar. But in this case, at least, he isn’t tweaking the nuts and bolts of sleds or harnesses; he’s tinkering with hearts, lungs and muscle. With a cross-training regimen designed to keep his dogs fit through the hottest summer months, King hopes his lake-swimming huskies already will have a significant leg up over the competition by the time the air turns crisp and birch leaves fall in cascades of yellow.
“I’m going to be starting with a dog team in September that will be doing 70- to 80-mile runs. I believe that,” King said. “The minute the temperature cools off, I will be doing 80s. Is that overtraining? I don’t think so. It gives the dogs a chance to shut down. I’ll give them a vacation in December instead of the classic big push. It’s fascinating.”
Most distance mushers, King included, typically are just getting their dogs in shape by September. Fall and early winter is a time of ramping up, with December usually being a very intense month getting teams in shape to run 300-mile races in early January. In September, teams may be running as little as five miles; many are going 10 to 20 miles; a few ratchet up the distance more than that. Just about all of them, however, are coming out of an “off season” – a time of year when it has simply been too hot for dogs to run more than a couple of miles without their tongues hanging to the ground. Even when they’re trotting slowly, sled dogs don’t do so well when temperatures exceed 60° Fahrenheit. They’re equipped for colder climates and seem happiest when the thermometer reads zero Fahrenheit, or below.
King’s research, which has involved a lot of time using the Google online search engine, indicates that animals or humans that swim during the down months benefit greatly when they get back into routine training. On the surface, it sounds like he may be overdoing it, physically. But studies suggest that swimming adds an extra dimension to a runner’s fitness. It works muscles, hearts and lungs without the pounding on the bones that happens with every footfall.
King hasn’t found many books on dog physiology that apply directly to what he’s doing, but there are volumes – especially on the Internet – about the value of swimming as a cross-training tool for runners and cyclists.
A nagging idea
For years, champions such as King, Susan Butcher and Rick Swenson have marveled at their dogs’ impressive level of conditioning after the Iditarod. They were finally in perfect shape. It seemed like teams could run forever at the tail end of the season. But what could be done? The snow eventually melted and the temperatures shot up. The dogs essentially sat all summer and lost their fitness. No amount of short, summer jogs can match the benefit of a six-hour run on snow. “Everything was pointing, to me, that we haven’t got dogs consistently in shape by the Iditarod,” King said.
Like other distance mushers, King paid attention to Lance Armstrong’s impressive dominance in the grueling Tour de France – the bicycle stage race that has significant parallels to the 1,100-mile trek by dog team from Anchorage to Nome. Armstrong benefited from a meticulous coach, Chris Carmichael, who wrote a book about his technique called, “The Ultimate Ride.” On Page 81 of that book, there’s a heading that reads, “There Is No Off-Season.”
Three short paragraphs under that headline summed up Carmichael’s strong opinion that sitting out even a month drops an athlete’s level of fitness so that it takes two to three months of training to regain that fitness.
It was an “aha” moment for King, who is constantly trying to find ways to give his team some tiny advantage. Tiny advantages make a huge difference over the course of a nine-day race. A better offseason fitness program hasn’t been attacked especially hard by dog mushers.
“That got me all revved up,” King said. Many human athletes swim in the offseason to cross train. And King has a sizeable lake on his property. The question simply became one of logistics: how to organize a swimming program for his dogs so it could become a safe routine.
How he does it
King started to put together his canine swimming idea more than a year ago. Down in Wasilla for the annual Iditarod sign-up picnic in 2005, he mentioned he was buying some fishing buoys and other supplies while in Anchorage. But he didn’t get the full package up and running on a daily basis until the summer of 2006.
The process isn’t simple – it can take five people working together – and King acknowledged he couldn’t make it work if he didn’t happen to have a lake within 100 yards of his dog kennel.
First, about 15 dogs are hooked by their collars to short tuglines attached to a main line corked with buoys. The line is strung between a couple of ATVs to hold the group steady as they make their way down to the lake. One end of the line is then clipped to a small boat with an outboard motor at the shoreline. Then the other end is clipped to a second boat. The boats idle out to the lake. At that point, it takes just two people, one in each boat, to dance the boats around a little to keep the lines reasonably straight, King said.
“For an hour and a half there’s just two people putting around at 3 to 4 mph,” he said. The dogs have been dragging the boats around since May. “They’re pulling a boat backwards while the prop of that boat is pushing forward. It’s amazing what we’re seeing in the power gain they’ve made. We don’t know if they’re learning a better technique of swimming or if they’re getting stronger. Clearly, they’re getting stronger, and probably better technique as well.”
From the start, most of the dogs have taken to swimming with gusto. One in 10 hated it, King said, acting goofy around the water, but they got over it. Once they’re out there, they swim in a single-file line, pulling forward against their collars.
It isn’t easy, but he has got it to the point where 30 dogs are swimming five days a week from 90 minutes to two hours.
“They free swim to shore, and bolt around like a cat on catnip,” King observed, wondering if he was perhaps not pushing them hard enough. “They come out clearly invigorated. And I have to feed them like it’s 40 below. That was one thing we all noticed.”
But if there is any doubt that the dogs are getting a solid workout, those doubts are dispelled at night. In the summer, most sled dogs wait till the evening hours to play and prance in the relatively cool Alaska air. Not King’s dogs. He said, “They sleep like the dead.”
The anticipated payoff
“I’m betting, I’m gambling, that I’m building an aerobic engine beyond compare,” King said. “All the books are saying it takes four months to do this in a human – four months to build an aerobic engine before you work on speed and technique.”
Some of the benefits of swimming include reaching muscle groups that aren’t developed by running alone. Web sites that promote swimming for horses and dogs indicate they build strength in the hind end, diaphragm and shoulders. Breathing is also more difficult with water pressure against the body, so the resistance builds respiratory strength. Mostly, though, studies show that swimming really helps the heart muscle.
Arleigh Reynolds, a renowned canine physiologist and nutritionist, has concluded that 30 minutes of swimming equates to about two hours of running in dogs. If King is swimming his dogs for two hours, then it should be equivalent to an eight-hour run, which is why he said a 70- to 80-mile run in September is not out of the question. Dogs average about 10 mph when they run long distances.
Another study with dogs said a five-minute swim is the equivalent of a five-mile run. King wonders if two hours of swimming equates to a 120-mile run. Right now, he’s only got the questions.
Running on hard ground is still critical to good conditioning, according to these Web sites. Nothing prepares an athlete – human or canine – for a running race as well as practicing in real conditions. The bones need the workout of the actual pounding from gravity.
King’s questions about the effectiveness of his offseason swimming program will be answered in due time.
At the very least, he’s not worried about his team’s ability to cross the inevitable stretches of open water in races. Creeks sometimes open up with water flowing up to a foot and a half deep over ice. Teams also have to skirt around treacherous open holes in the ice on major rivers such as the Yukon. That thought made him pause, if only in mock fear.
“I don’t think my dogs were prone to jumping in the water before we started this, but they sure are now. Won’t this backfire when they jump into an open lead in the Yukon?” King said, laughing, then quickly added, “I don’t really believe they will.”