Saturday, November 24, 2012

Recovery Days, Some TLC And Good Time With The Kids

The last two days were the recovery days. Not in terms of recovery from our scary run on Wednesday, as some of my friends worried after reading the story, and thankfully also not because of some extensive injuries or fatigue.

We simply make recovery days after a series of runs, or after one long, extra hard run or camping trip. 
I wrote about the recovery days a bit in detail last year in this post
The past two days were not much different. All the four legged athletes got massages and stretching and an overall check up. All ran lose in the yard, playing, socializing and simply enjoying a day off.

What we paid an extra attention to, this time, were their feet. All the main string dogs have cracks in their pads this year, something we´ve never had before. It´s due to the long (and unfortunately still lasting) period of wetness and mud. They work hard for three months running in water, mud or in the best scenario, frozen gravel. The skin on their feet never got the chance to properly roughen up during the first month of training, as it usually does each year, due to being constantly soaking wet. 

We all work hard on pampering their feet every day before and after run, and most of the kids run in booties at the moment. So a recovery day or a day off from running is an excellent opportunity for some more pampering :)

In this video, I am trying to show you how I apply Mountain Ridge´s WEB MED - a zinc based ointment with essential oils and herbs added. It is perfect for healing cracks and similar foot injuries of the canine athlete.


Below, Krtek is inspecting one of the houses as we added some fresh straw:


And I thought to include also one video of the kids running around the lot, also showing Katka giving Inuk a thorough massage:


Recovery days are not only very important part of our training program, but the kids and us just love spending the time together with each other.

We´ll be taking them out for two more runs this week and then the vaccination "vacation" is on the agenda, while the weather is still wet, warm and simply un-winterish. Now we are all waiting, praying and dancing for snow. Do the snow dance with us, please! :)

Take care and stay safe. Happy Trails!

1 comment:

Jachym said...

Only two more weeks and I'll be home with you all. Can't wait!