For father, son, dog-sled racing has become addiction
Scooby and Aggie are ready to lead. Curly, Rosie, Toes, Beak, Coyote, Clem and Cody are ready to run.
Scrappy? Well, he’s really, really ready to run.
Scrappy could use a doggie downer.
Brett Hitchcock’s 10-dog team is harnessed and strapped to a motorized 4-wheeler, anxious to be turned loose on its weekly, winter 10-mile romp across the countryside just outside Sherrard, Ill.
The two sled-dog teams Brett and his father, Denny, raise, train and race out of Denny’s 20-acre rural Sherrard farm are believed to be the only such teams between Waterloo, Iowa, and the Chicago area.
The 28 dogs the Hitchcocks currently house will consume 50 pounds of dry food daily in a light-eating summer, and 20 to 25 pounds of dry food mixed with 10 to 15 pounds of beef or beaver in the winter months.
A good lead dog like Scooby or Aggie can sell for $1,500 or more.
A state-of-the-art sled costs that much or more new, and a good used one will run between $300 and $400.
Factor in the cost of a 900-mile round trip in a 1-ton pickup to race two or three times this year in northern Wisconsin locales, and this clearly is no inexpensive avocation.
“It’s not a break-even sport,’’ Brett conceded.
For the Hitchcocks, it simply is addictive.
Denny, who migrated to the Quad-Cities in 1969 to teach drama at Augustana before eventually opening the Circa 21 Dinner Playhouse in Rock Island, was introduced to the sport in 1963 by a high school teacher in his native St. Paul, Minn.
A year later, he was running and training the teacher’s dogs.
In 1968, the teacher gave him two dogs, and a lifetime love was kindled.
It would not be quite right to call sled-dog racing a Hitchcock family affair. A childhood tumble in a sled turned off daughter Darcy in a hurry, and Denny sheepishly concedes his wife, Carolyn, is a fan of neither the time nor the money he invests.
Brett, though, got his first dog sled 30 years ago at age 3, raced his first race just two years later, and might be more engrossed now in the “hobby’’ than his 66-year-old father.
“We don’t have a lot of common interests,’’ the father said. “This, through his whole life, has been a bond.’’
The bond, of course, extends to the dogs, who the Hitchcocks breed, buy and, also, sell.
Forced to guesstimate, Denny will say he has had between 500 and 600 dogs in his lifetime. He keeps a few dogs now too old to race but has sold others too slow to keep pace with the Hitchcock teams to other hobbyists who can continue to race them in less competitive divisions.
That is an act of kindness, he stressed.
“These dogs are bred to run — they aren’t house pets,’’ he said. “It is best for the dog to move them to somebody who will run them.’’
That said, given the countless hours in a week spent tending to and training the likes of Scooby and Aggie and, even, the excitable, yappy Scrappy, the dogs do, indeed, become family.
“They are still pets to us,’’ Brett said. “They are still companions to us, and you still get attached to them.
“Besides the fact it makes it nicer for us when we like them and they like us,’’ he added, “they will also run better. The idea is to train the dogs to run for the driver.’’
Run, these dogs do. It is in their nature, a part of their breeding dating back for hundreds of years.
What doesn’t date back for centuries is the nature of these dogs. The modern sled dog is not the plodding Alaskan Huskie of Jack Londonesque lore.
Scrappy and most highly competitive sled dogs like him are a cross between a Huskie and a German Shorthair, with some Greyhound or Saluki mixed in for speed.
The result is a lighter, longer, faster dog.
They average about 45 pounds full grown, start training as pups by pulling a window weight and can become part of a racing team as early as one year of age.
Because the snowpack here typically is too thin for sledding, the Hitchcocks train their teams in front of a 4-wheeler every Saturday and Sunday in winter months.
In summer, they will run them on the farm.
At top speeds in front of a sled, teams will hit 30 mph. The Hitchcock teams tend to average 17 to 18 mph over a 10-mile course.
Father and son used to race much more seriously — in the 70s, Denny’s teams consistently ranked in the world’s top five in their division, and in 1992 Brett had a top-10 team.
Both Hitchcocks have dealt with frequent frostbite, but, these days — thanks, they say, to global warming — Midwest races are becoming increasingly scarce.
The Hitchcocks hope to race three times yet this year but say they are at the mercy of the weather.
Still, they plan to keep Scrappy and friends happily on the run for a long time coming.
“A couple years ago, we drove 450 miles one way to a race,’’ Denny said. “We raced the first day for 30 minutes, and the next day’s race was cancelled.
“That was a 900-mile trip for 30 minutes of racing, our only race of the year. And it was worth it.’’
Craig DeVrieze can be contacted at (563) 333-2610 or cdevrieze@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com