Hello Boys and Girls,

This year, 62 mushers have signed up to run the 2011 Iditarod!  That means 62 teams of K9 athletes will be spending the next few months continuing their training for the Last Great Race®!  I say ‘continuing’ because my fur friends have been in training for the past year or even longer!  My friends have been running, climbing up and down hills, running through trails, crossing streams, and exercising since they were young pups.  They have many pulling and racing miles beneath their paws already!  My fur friends love to race, to run, to pull sleds, and to have adventures!  Now in these final weeks before the race, they’ll be working hard to make sure they are fit and healthy to start the race!

Boys and Girls, although I have pulled a sled before just for the fun of it while out hanging around with my friends, I don’t pull a sled and race any more.  I have a ‘different kind of race’ going on.  I’m in a race to bring you stories about the K9 athletes, the mushers, the race, and other topics that you might be interested in reading about this year.

I’m lucky to have a K9 team of journalists working with me again this year.

Gypsy, Sanka W. Dog, and Libby will all be ‘racing’ with me, to cover the kind of stories that you want to read.

Don’t forget you can leave comments for us at the comment section beneath each article.  The comments will be posted after we’ve read them.  If you ask a question, we’ll answer it!  All those comments and questions make us sing happy howl songs because we love to hear from you and we love to share your comments with all of our readers!

You can also write email messages to us by clicking this link and we’ll answer those email messages, too.  We’ve already gotten a lot of email!  If you ask a question or want a reply, please be patient with us because we’re so busy chasing stories, we might not check our email as often as we should.  So if you want to hear back from us sooner, leave a comment message after the stories we write, because we are so much faster at answering your questions that way!  But either way, our job as it always has been — is to share the race with you!

So what do you say, Boys and Girls?  Let’s get ready to cheer on our friends!  The 2011 Iditarod starts March 5th in downtown Anchorage!  The ReStart is the next day, March 6, in Willow!  Let’s give one big long howl song for all of the mushers and Iditarod dogs to cheer them on as they train for the race!

H   O   W   L   I   N   G       A       L   O   N   G       I   D   I   T   A   R   O   D       S   O   N   G!

Lots of  Tail Wags,

Zuma