‘Dog Mushing is a Next Year Sport’

I’m afraid that I have some very unfortunate news regarding Race to the Sky.

Very late Tuesday night I went out to do a night check in the dog yard. I had been up late sorting gear for the race and was about ready to drop on my feet. I went around to the dogs making sure everything looked normal and was headed back to the house for some rest before an even longer day of packing the next day, when I heard a cough.
I walked over to Brother thinking over and over, please don’t cough again please don’t cough again. But he did.

Upon a visit to the vet the next day, Brother was presenting symptoms of Kennel Cough or something very similar.
Every dog on my team and in my Kennel is vaccinated for a multitude of things, one of them being Kennel cough, but of course, even if a dog is vaccinated it is still possible for them to get a virus.
We travel to many races that have many teams that come from all over. We also train on public use trails with a parking lot that often doubles as a rest stop for travelers, where many people bring their dogs. I don’t know where Brother picked up the virus, it could have been any number of places, but I do know this:

This is highly contagious among dogs and it would be irresponsible to bring a dog that is sick, and dogs that have been exposed, to a race site and put other teams at risk, (not to mention it’s against the rules). There is also a possibility, that despite them all being vaccinated, the rest of the team could pick it up too. So this year, we will not be attending Race to the Sky.

It’s still not quite real, but it is painful. We’ve been working for this race since September. I’ve put in hours and hours of time and training into making it to this race. It meant a lot to me.
So for this weekend I will be avoiding Facebook and updates on the race, and watching Netflix and cuddling my team.

Looking at it in a positive light, it gives me the opportunity to go to some races later in the season that I have not been too. Race to the Sky is fortunately a race that is very close to home and I have years to run it again and again and again.

My dogs health and wellbeing will always come before any race.
Dogs first. Always.