|
Need a workout? Give skijoring a try
Copyright © 1997 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||
 |
Related Story: Skijoring: A story in pictures | |||||
Who's gotten fatter this winter, you or your dog? Before you answer, there's a way to make that depressing question moot. Start skijoring, a century-old sport that's gaining popularity in Maine. Here's how it works: Put a padded belt around a skier's waist and hitch a 6-to 12-foot line to a dog (or dogs), forming a human/canine team that can speed along at up to 25 mph.p>
Even Sara Vanderwood of Oxford, an expert cross country skier who has raced sled dogs since grade school, had her doubts. "I always thought skijoring was crazy,'' she says with a laugh."I said, 'There's no way you could ever get me to do that.' '' Yet Vanderwood changed her mind in a big way. In 1995, as a student at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, she placed second at the North American skijoring championships. She returned home to win New England's first skijoring race, at Rangeley last winter. This year, she's competed in three Maine races, winning two and placing second at Rangeley last weekend to Fran Plaisted of Lyme, N.H. Vanderwood, 25, also has become a kind of skijoring missionary, converting dog lovers at clinics and giving private lessons ($20 an hour; call 539-4324) with her husband, Marc. Other than wanting to know what the heck it is, the first question most people ask her about skijoring is where it originated - which is a rather an interesting story. When gold was discovered in the Klondike region of northwestern Canada in 1896, the strike drew tens of thousands of would-be millionaires from all over the world. In the Klondike and Alaska, many of the miners got their first glimpse of dog sleds, a means of transportation in far northern latitudes for more than a thousand years. (The Royal Canadian Mounted Police patrolled the frontier with sled-dog teams from 1873 to 1969.) When the Scandinavian miners returned home, they combined the age-old technology of dog-sledding with a relatively new invention. The creation of modern skis dates back only to 1850, when Sondre Norheim of Norway made the first stiff bindings by tying twisted pieces of wet birch roots around his boots. As they dried, the roots became stiff and held the skis much more securely - thus making them more maneuverable - than the leather straps used previously. Both skiing and sled-dog racing began to develop into sports early in this century, but a world apart. The first organized sled-dog race took place in Nome, Alaska, in 1908, around the same time skiing was becoming competitive in Europe. So, Vanderwood says, the next step, taken by unknown Scandinavians, was simply logical. "They figured, well, we'll take a couple of dogs, and we'll take our love of skiing, and we'll pair them together,'' she says. Initially, a small weighted sled called a pulk (similar to the sleds some people today used to pull children around) was placed between the skier and the dogs. There are still pulk races today, and weights can be placed in the sled to level the playing field - a lightweight driver handicapped with a heavier weight. But for training, the pulk was often discarded. Thus, skijoring, with nothing between the skier and the dogs but a line, was born. (The word combines "ski'' with"jor,'' the Norwegian word for"ride'' or"drive.'') Still, at least in North America, it remained more a dog-training technique than a sport until the mid-1980s, when the Alaska Dog Mushers' Association added skijoring classes to some dog-sled races. The next year, the Alaska Skijoring and Pulk Association was formed. Now, there is a world championship, drawing competitors from both sides of the globe, in which Vanderwood someday hopes to compete. Looking back, it seems Vanderwood was headed straight toward skijoring from childhood - but she certainly didn't realize it. Her parents, Grey and Kathy Pickett, bought her a Siberian husky named Katrina when she was 5. Within a year, the family had become a home for wayward or unwanted sled dogs, 13 in all. Soon, the whole family was racing, and the Picketts were supplementing their income by making and selling sled-dog equipment. Now, they have 17 dogs, which Kathy still races, and their business, Nooksack Racing Supply, has added a new line of skijoring equipment. As Vanderwood grew up, she also began to race on her own two feet. Competing for Oxford Hills High School, she was considered one of the best schoolgirl runners in the state. She won the freshman state championship in the mile and set a Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference record in the cross country meet as a junior. She also led a relay team that twice placed second in the state, and she was a member of a cross country team finishing second at the Junior Olympics national meet. Because of her cross country running, Vanderwood was drafted onto the Oxford Hills ski team. But she always considered skiing just a way to keep in shape between the cross country and track seasons. "I was completely afraid to go downhill on cross country skis,'' Vanderwood says."I just did not feel like I had a lot of control.'' Still, she was good enough to be offered a cross country ski scholarship to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where she also planned to run cross country. A knee injury her freshman year ended her college athletic career, but once her knee mended, she discovered a new sport - skijoring. When Marc, then her boyfriend, first tried to interest her in the sport, she told him,"You're nuts. There's no way I'm putting a band around my waist and attaching it to a dog when I'm on skis.'' But when he persisted, she hitched herself to her blue-eyed husky Marley, named after the late reggae star Bob Marley. On hard-packed ice in a Fairbanks street, she told Marley to start pulling. When he felt her weight, Marley stopped, looking back at her in surprise, as if to ask what the heck was going on. Vanderwood urged him on again, and again he stopped when the rope grew taut. "He kind of looked back and said, 'All right,' and he just took off,'' Vanderwood says."He's been doing it ever since.'' Don't think, though, that the human member of a skijor team just gets hauled along like a sack of potatoes. The ones who want to win races - and Vanderwood does - work just as hard as their dogs. "If you can skate behind them, you're taking that much pressure off the dogs,'' she explains. Skijorers race with one, two or three dogs, but just as in sled-dog racing, can go only as fast as the slowest team member. Which is why the best skier usually wins. "At the world championships, the guy who won skied eight miles in 28 minutes,'' Vanderwood said."So basically he was skiing as fast as the dog was running.'' With her two-dog team, including Marley and another husky named Dash, Vanderwood can travel at a pretty fast clip. At Rangeley last weekend, she covered about three miles in 13 minutes, 14 seconds on the first day, and cut her time to 12:51 the second. For a confirmed dog-lover like Vanderwood, being part of the team is one of the great pleasures of skijoring, and the reason she now prefers it to sled racing. "When you're on a sled, you always feel there's sort of a disconnection,'' she says."You can fall off, and the dogs can go off by themselves. But with skijoring, you're like an extra dog on that team.'' And, yes, dogs do occasionally run away with a skier - mostly if they become overly interested in a competitor. "I've been drug around a few times, but it's usually when there's another dog around,'' she says. The good news is if the skier falls, the dogs stop - though not so much out of concern as because it's rather like an anchor being dropped. For safety's sake, the line to the dogs also has a quick-release snap within arm's length of the skier. Skijoring, however, is not just for the very competitive nor only for owners of huskies. German short-hair pointers are popular for skijoring, Vanderwood says, and an excellent skier won the North American one-dog race not long ago with his house pet - a black Labrador retriever. Anyone with an eager dog, a pair of skis and poles, and $55 for a belt, line and harness could give skijoring a try, Vanderwood says. For winter couch potatoes - on four feet or two - it's a great way to burn off calories quickly. "I've seen basset hounds do it,'' she says."Obviously, not a chihuahua, but pretty much any dog that will run and pull can do it.''
|
||||||
