It took seven years of racing for Billy Snodgrass to prepare himself mentally to take on the Iditarod. For the past year he's been training his team full time for this event. And since the snow first fell in the mountains of Wyoming last October, he's put 2,000 miles on each of his dogs, and 10,000 miles on himself. Billy Snodgrass, wearing the wolverine ruff coat his wife made for him back in Wyoming, leads the team on an Alaska training run. Conditioning is physical, putting miles on a dog and building stamina into the muscles.
Training means teaching a dog mentally what it can do, and that's a lot harder.
Teaching dogs to lead is the core of Billy's training program. It starts in the summer. Billy uses the accelerator, so the dogs aren't really doing all of the pulling. But in this way they learn to run alone, out front, without fear. The summer heat prevents each dog from running more than a few miles before sunrise or after sunset, but Billy never lets them stop before they get back to the dog yard.