Click here for race website

There are not that many things that I truly believe in, leprechauns, alcohol and the rites of the atheist aside, but I am a firm believer that feelings and emotions can travel both ways along the gangline and sled. If I am positive, happy and relaxed (a rare state for me I must say) there is much more of a chance that the dogs will be happy and relaxed and we will have a clean and enjoyable run; if I am tense and irritable I think the team sense this and so they too are a little more on edge and so less likely to perform to their maximum potential. With this theory in mind I try to get to races in good time, be well prepared and try to be relaxed with, and around, the dogs. Sometimes it is just not possible to achieve such high states of karmic mantra. On occasion we have traveled throughout the night, arriving at the race site with a fatigued and irritable musher and a restless and slightly disconsolate team. On a few occasions we have even had such a nightmare that not only have we not turned up at the race on time (oh the joy of the double negative) but we have been subject to one bout of misfortune after another. In fact I exaggerate; the occasions that such eventualities have actually occurred are so rare that, to date, it has happened only the once - Greenville 2010.

I guess in order to make a short, dull story long, yet equally dull, the problem really began the week before Greenville. I had planned to drive down to Maine on the Friday morning, stay with Alex and Lucille from Maine Made Sleds, race at Brownville on Saturday and then stay at Alex and Lucille's camp for the week training over different trails and preparing for Greenville the following week. For someone as organised as myself it is hard to understand what exactly went wrong with this plan, forged as it was in the mind of one trained in the flawless intricacies of UK military procurement, possibly my tongue was just wedged too far into my cheek or my head wedged too far up my as it was I just could not get myself ready on the Friday. So late on the Friday evening, when I was supposed to be safely ensconced in Alex' cabin, I was still trying to pack enough gear into the van to see myself and the dogs through the following week.

Not to be deterred, I eventually did get everything sorted and with the van packed to the rafters, I am never one to travel light, we set off at 0300 safe in the knowledge that, barring a vehicular disaster (which lets face it never happens to us) I would arrive at Brownville in good time and with the dogs fairly refreshed and ready to race.

And in fact all did go fairly much to plan: no real issues with the van (although -25ºC coupled with no heating in the van made for a chilly journey and even chillier toes), we crossed the border without issue, arrived on time and had a reasonably good race. Things, however, started to unwind a bit after the race: firstly I noticed that Keelut, my early barometer for impending sexual activity in the van, was showing far too much interest in Antigone - just what I needed, a week away from home with the dogs sleeping in the van and one of the girls in season - I began to question the sense of not making the 4 hour journey home. Then, to compound matters, when I drove away from Brownville, and towards Abbott's Village and the Camp, I noticed that the van's glow plug warning light was flashing. To my untrained eye I took this to mean that one or more of the glow plugs were failing; silly me, what it turned out to mean was that the brake lights weren't working - well of course. (As it turned out it couldn't have meant that the glow plugs were failing because all 5 glow plugs had long since stopped working but I am getting a week ahead of myself here). With a bitch in season and a bitch of a van I decided that I would drive over to say Hi to Lucille (Alex had spent the day at Brownville) and then head home instead of staying in Maine and risking the van never starting again (as if that would ever happen - but again with the getting ahead of myself).

As it turned out all went, roughly, to plan. Although nervous about letting the engine get too cool (this van ain't cool) we had a very quick visit with Lucille, apologised profusely at not turning up the previous evening as agreed, stared in awe at the sumptuous nature of their 'camp', which I would not now be enjoying, and then took an incident free drive home, albeit accompanied all the way by the flashing of the glow plug light.

Having honed my VW mechanical and electrical skills through the engineering oracle that is Google, the following day I determined and found a short in the wiring system for the brake lights. Short fixed, flashing gone I prepared myself for a nice quiet week at home: lots of training, no vehicle problems and so it was - for two days at least. On Wednesday morning, as I prepared to head out for the final training run of the week for the 'race' team, the van failed to start and this was very quickly followed by a very flat battery. Hmm; block heater plugged in (why hadn't I done that the night before) battery on charge; by mid afternoon we once more had a running van. Too late for the intended 16 mile training run I figured I would just take the team out for a 10 mile jaunt the following morning. Following morning, engine won't start, battery goes flat in double-quick time, training aborted. Revert to Plan B: blindly ignore the fact that there is obviously something very amiss with the engine/battery, charge the battery up, pull the van under the cover of the car port in order to keep the little darling warm and plan to set off to Maine on Friday morning. Stay with Alex and Lucille and then, gods willing, drive the short distance to Greenville the following morning and have a fun, successful and care free race. And to be fair right up to the point where I walked out to start the van on Saturday morning Plan B had in fact worked a treat. The fact that the Camp was 'off-grid' meant that I had a certain degree of reluctance about asking to plug the block heater in: never mind I would run the van for thirty minutes before going to bed on the Friday evening (just to get the engine warm), then get up at two or three am and run the engine again and then hey presto there would be no problem starting the van at 0630. Great idea except for the fact that my bed was far too warm to crawl out of at 0200 (or even at 0300 if it comes to that) and I foolishly resolved that the van would be fine. So to the 0630 start - nothing, except for the battery going flat in short order (but good old me, I had brought a battery charger with me - you would think I was expecting problems). 0700 - nothing, not even close to firing so we connected Alex' truck to the van in order to 'boost' the battery. 0715, nothing; 0730, nothing. 0745 (and the time for the mushing meeting getting ever closing), nothing; 0800, nothing. By this time Alex and Lucille's neighbour, Richie, had turned up and after much head scratching and a bit of tinkering, the engine gets very close to firing but in reality, nothing. And then at 0815, literally nothing - turn the key and the engine doesn't even turn over. I figure, rightly as it turned out, that I had burnt the starter solenoid out.

So to Plan C, call James Wheeler at the musher meetings and ask him to cover for me; load dogs and sled into Alex' truck and have him drive me to the race site in good time to compete; and this is where I really begin to screw up their weekend as well as my own. Not only were Alex and Lucille both planning on attending the race as spectators and so having a fun-filled day together, but if they could drum up a bit of trade in the process all the better. Now however Alex was stuck with me and my 9 previously un-dog-box acclimatised huskies. Oh well what could possibly go wrong.

We arrived at the venue for the musher's meeting just as the final vehicle was pulling out. Due to the unseasonably high temperatures and trail depleting rain the week before, the Greenville organisers had been forced to cancel the 100 mile race (I was in the 30 so still running) and divert the start of the 30 away from the glare ice on the lake to a new, and more remote venue out of town. Forgetting that I had planned to collect water for the dogs at the musher's meeting, we headed off, waterless, to the race start.

As we were being directed down to our parking spot race organiser Amy Dugan came up and handed me my bib: "Sorry this is probably the cause of your vehicle problems this morning" she said, handing me bib number 13 - I smiled, weakly (you may recall that the bad luck supposedly inspired by this fateful number did not fall within my belief-creed; touch-wood things wouldn't get worse). We parked up and discovered, much to my embarrassment and Alex' (well disguised) chagrin, that at least two dogs were chewing their way out of his previously well made and pristine boxes; I resolved to get the dogs dropped as quickly as possible in an effort to save the remaining boxes. As the final dog was coming out I semi-subconsciously figured that my bad luck may be at an end; the semi-subconscious thought lasted about the single nano-second that it took me to stand on and then crash through the steps down from the back of Alex' truck. So not only had I ruined his weekend and his dog boxes, now I had destroyed his means of accessing his dog boxes; all this and my van was still blocking up his camp in a seemingly terminal condition. Oh how I wanted to go home; I slipped away to find James, Brian and their ever chilled supply of beer - it was after all 1000 and so somewhere in the British Empire the sun was setting over the yard-arm, and so a reasonable hour of the day to drink; even, I must add, if the dark clouds were still rolling in over this one particular outpost and subject.

Apart from the collecting of water for the dogs, there had been one other very important reason why I had wanted to attend the musher's meeting: I wanted to know what the trail conditions and terrain were going to be like for the race. Brownville, the week before and one time venue of the checkpoint for the Greenville 100, had proved to be a very hard-packed and relatively flat trail (anyone disputing these flatness claims are invited to 'compete' at Eagle Lake next year). I figured that with Brownville being so close to Greenville, and even in fact sharing a ville, albeit of a different hue, there was a very good possibility that this too would be a hard, fast course and therefore better suited to the faster dogs in the kennel. As such I had brought nine dogs with me for this eight dog race, not with the intent of deceiving the organisers and racing all nine, but on the proviso that if the trail was going to be flat and fast then I would run the ever lithe Cassie (Cassie had been adding between 1 and 1.5 mph average to every training run when up at lead), however if the trail conditions were heavier and/or the terrain more mountainous then I would run Medea: stronger, older and hence more reliable and with greater levels of stamina. Having missed this vital decision making tool of the musher's meeting, I wandered around the race site before the race trying to discuss trail conditions with the Race Marshal and anyone else I could bore. However despite asking the right questions I wasn't really listening to what I was being told: I heard murmurings of hills and switchbacks, good levels of snow on the trail, a trail that was predominantly over well-used snowmobile trails so likely to be quite churned up. All of which suggested Medea suiting slow and heavy; all of which I translated into Cassie-like flat and fast - perhaps I shouldn't have let the sun cross the yard-arm, or maybe it was just that my mind was so preoccupied with the broken down van and getting home that I wasn't able to correctly interpret the facts - I decided that I would start with Cassie.

As stated earlier this wasn't the first time in the past week that I had been concerned with getting the van going; I had missed the final 'team' training run on the previous Wednesday because the van wouldn't start. In my vanless angst I had actually forgotten why that training run was going to be so important. On the previous Monday I had run Medea and Cassie at lead in order to get an idea which of the two was performing the best and to get a(nother) idea as to if Medea could run comfortably at lead alongside Cassie's pace. Throughout most of the run on that Monday I had noticed a partial, and very unusual, reluctance on behalf of Cassie to run at speed and, more significantly, had noted that she was often running with her head held quite high. Cassie has beautiful movement and she normally has a very flat top line from tail to head when running smoothly and so perhaps there was a problem there that I had previously missed; maybe the speed and hard packed Brownville trail had caused a wrist injury that had gone undetected. As a final check I was going to look closely at Cassie's gait on the Wednesday run and could then decide if she should even be 'on the van' for Greenville. However with the concerns over the non-starting van plaguing my mind, and with missing the final Wednesday training run, I had put Cassie's potential injury to the back of my mind: ever the concerned musher and team manager - not. 

And so it was with my mind focused more on the van than the race, my emotions plagued by the fact that I had destroyed Alex' weekend, dog boxes and truck ladder, and the decision made, wrongly as it turns out, to run Cassie instead of Medea, a psychological mess steered his team into the starting chute. I am not sure what feelings and emotions were traveling back and forth along the lines that morning, but positively charged  and harmonious they certainly were not. I tried to push all but the race from my mind: van, boxes, van, ladder, van, bloody van, bloody bloody won't start bloody van - I had had my three pieces of bad luck so #13 would no longer have any effect; even if I believed in such things, which of course I didn't/don't.

 3 - 2 - 1. We burst from the start chute at speed and straight away I could see that Cassie was necklining, seemingly not happy with the speed. Many things crossed my mind: she was not happy with the crowds lining the start, she would get over that as we headed out into the bush; the initial speed was too much for her, the speed would soon drop as we settled into the run; maybe she was not happy running next to Terror, I could always stop and swap dogs around once the team had lost their initial starting frenzy. I really was only kidding myself however, this was not at all like Cassie and she had never suffered any of these qualms before. I considered turning round and heading back to the truck in an effort to drop her before restarting the race but figured that with the other seven dogs so hyped up this would be tantamount to suicide (not suicide as far as my race chances were concerned, just suicide in that I would probably die trying to turn the team around so soon after the start); I considered stopping and 'bagging' her but didn't fancy the prospect of another 25 miles with seven dogs on the lines and one on the sled and so I resolved to see how it would go once the team settled into a slower and more gentle rhythm and we started to climb a few mountains. Unfortunately things didn't get any better: the up-hills were steep (much, much steeper than Brownville - the infamous switchbacks that occurred just after the turn at half way were a veritable nightmare); however steep, slow up-hills meant equally steep, fast down-hills. As the race progressed Cassie was even having problems keeping up with the rest of the team on the flat: we slowed in order to keep the lines tight and to stop her from necklining but in all honesty I really should have bagged her early on.

We finished in a much slower time than the previous week and we ambled back to Alex' truck, mind still fixed on the dead van, emotions still scarred by the canine induced damage to the previously pristine truck and angry with myself for running Cassie the whole way. Well and truly mentally scarred I got back to the truck only to discover Medea tied up outside the dogs boxes - apparently as soon as she saw us leave without her she had decided that she was going to eat her way out of the dog boxes and join us on the trail. Now to find a bloody big rock to crawl under.

As it turned out the race hadn't been a complete disaster, we finished 12th of 18 and were not that far behind most of the other purebred teams. Also once back at the truck Cassie seemed happy enough and I was unable to find any evidence of foot, wrist or shoulder injury (although having stiffened up in the van overnight she did start limping the next day). We got back to the Camp without further incident, the dogs too tired to decimate the boxes further, either that or they felt that their 'confined  in an unusual place' protest had probably run it's course. For some bizarre reason I tried the key in the ignition again in the vain hope that the very same leprechauns and/or pixies that I undoubtedly believe in, had repaired the starter solenoid - nothing, the little people had failed me again (as an aside my search for the pot o'gold continues  - I shall take up with rainbows I think). However even the starterless van wasn't the disaster we thought it was going to be: CAA had confirmed through Louise that they would cover towing us home so I wasn't 'Lost in Maine' just yet. And so having eaten my fill of a delicious Lucille inspired lamb supper and had a beautiful warm shower inspired by Lucille's charming comments that I smelled really bad, I retired to bed early hoping that the next day would bring fresh hope.    

And indeed it did. Having spent the night in Greenville celebrating his third place position (no need to mention the fact that he was beaten by a team of Siberian's), James, and Brian, were coming out to the Camp for a Sunday morning training run with Alex. We decided that I too would go on the training run before calling up CAA and facing the long haul back to NB on the back of a salvage wagon. However with the words of the immortal Rabbie Burn's ringing in ma ears: "Hoot's mon get ya arse oot there and fix the bletherin' hoss-less wag'n ya saft wee southern s.s.s.s.sassenach" (bet you didn't realise that the Burnster had a stutter - there'll be no 'welcome in the hillside' for me after that comment - or is it the Welsh who welcome you in the hillside? The Scot's tend to just take the high road. Ah the Celts, they're all the same really, bless them). Actually on reflection maybe I am thinking of the Bard of Ayrshire's lesser known missive relating to mice and men going out a glaying together - I'm not too sure which, or what I am talking about either if it comes to that. Anyway when Richie turned up for coffee he and Alex, ignored the fact that I was curled up in the corner, clutching my knees and rocking back and forth whilst humming Auld Lang Syne, and they set about getting the van going. Contraptions were rigged up to warm the engine and much under hood sucking of teeth ensued, yet all failed to inspire the solenoid, or engine, back into life and so we resolved to try one final thing - a last ditch effort at tow starting.

And so it was with fingers crossed and a silent plea to Allah (I really must review my superstition and belief systems) one quick, short tow and the engine purred into life - well it coughed, spluttered, spewed forth environment quashing exhaust the likes of which America had not seen since the captain of Exxon Valdez had suggested that it was time for nap (notice that I didn't say nip as that could be viewed as both Scottish and libelous) and then became the rattling bag of noise and pollution that it ever was - but still it was going. All I had to do now was get all the way home without stopping, stalling or crashing: not a guaranteed thing as it was less than a month since my previous freezing rain inspired venture into the central reservation that had resulted in a stall (whilst facing in the wrong direction along the Quebec highway) and I knew that the border guards, whilst harassing my paperwork, always insist on me turning the engine off so as not to fill their huts with diesel fumes. Oh well the closer I could get to Canada the easier and quicker it would be to get towed home. After a few more 'coffees for the road', a fill up on Abbott's Village Bakery Apple Pie and the decision made to give the training run the miss, we hit the road ... for a completely uneventful journey home.

Having pulled into the dog yard many cold, heaterless hours later, unloaded all the dogs and pulled out into the drive I turned the key to the off position and let the engine sigh, splutter, shudder and shake to a terminal halt. In one last act of desperation (and/or hope that Seamus the mini-mechanic had been working hard at the solenoid all the way home) I turned to key back to the ignition position - nothing - bloody lazy Celtic hobgoblins, bloody van.

Days later with 5 glow plugs replaced, one starter solenoid reconditioned, oh and the internal heater working again for the first time in two years, we were back on the road. However with the words of the Francophone mechanic's translator reverberating around my ears ('Your water pump, it is dying! You need to get a new on from Angleterre immédiatement! You are going to Saint-Pamphile ce semaine? Êtes-vous mad?'), I am not sure how much longer we'll be on the road for. Oh well three more races and one trip to Nova Scotia and we can park the van problems - for another year.

By the gods Zeus and Jupiter perhaps I should take up religion in an effort to change my luck; now what did I do with my copy of the Satanic Verses?

Rob