Blake Freking Prepares His Team for the Beargrease

Freking and his wife, Jennifer, are both mushing in the Beargrease full marathon

FINLAND, Minn. – Blake and Jennifer Freking opened Manitou Crossing Kennels in 2003.

It’s now home to dozens of Siberian Huskies who all race competitively throughout North America.

“I would say I am living the dream,” said Blake Freking. “As a kid this is kind of what I was dreaming of and I didn’t think it was actually going to be fulfilled but here we are.”

From the time they’re puppies, the huskies work on physical training and socialization.

“It’s a lot of bonding early on and then we start with younger teams and some of our younger teams will run races like the shorter Beargreases and that kind of stuff until they get to be about two years old and they’ll graduate to our main group and then they’ll be running races like the marathon and some of those big races,” explained Freking.

Blake and his wife, Jennifer, are planning to take take twenty–four of the fifty–two dogs from Manitou Crossing Kennels and race two teams in this week’s John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon.

The two Beargrease teams were chosen based on how the dogs responded to different types of conditions present on the marathon trail.

For months, the dogs have been putting the miles in on trails surrounding the kennels.

“These guys all have around two thousand miles on so far this year and so we start out with shorter runs, three to five miles, and just slowly increment up to where we’re doing bigger runs and then we start doing back to back runs like we would do on the Beargrease trail,” said Freking.

This will be Blake’s eleventh full-length Beargrease. His team won the race in 2004.

He thinks this year’s team will do well but says the dogs’ health is always the most important thing.

“I really don’t pay a lot of attention to what the other teams are doing,” said Freking. “I’m running my own team so I’m totally focused on them and their well being and the happier they are the faster we’re going to go.”

The race starts Sunday morning at Billy’s Bar in Duluth. Teams will travel three-hundred miles to Grand Portage.