Robert Forto

Dreamchaser Leadership

Scuba Certified

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Some people live their lives trying completing to complete a bucket list. I too have that list that I think about and at 48 years old I sometimes wonder if I will leave my bucket half empty or half full. I guess it’s the way you look at it really.

For my entire life I have wanted to become a certified scuba diver. I have wanted to do this since I saw the movie Creature From the Black Lagoon on tv on Creature Feature when I was a little kid.

Then I saw Jaws and it was all over! I knew at some point in my life I would breathe under water.

When I finished up by degree last year at the University of Alaska Anchorage (yep another one of those items in the bucket), my wife Michele gave me a graduation gift that would take a lifetime to achieve. Dive with Great White Sharks in Mexico.

I quickly went online and found a trip and plopped down a thousand bucks for a deposit and scheduled my trip for November 2019. First I had to become scuba certified.

I headed down to one of the two dive shops in Anchorage and signed up. That was in March 2018. I breezed through the online course work and completed my confined water dives at the local high school pool in April. Then life got in the way–graduation, a summer expedition, dog mushing, rock concerts and roller coasters and even an earthquake!

I quickly realized that I had to have my dive course done in a year and if I didn’t jump on it fast I would have to start all over.

The dive shop that I did my confined dives with was either booked or had nothing scheduled so I went to the other guys, Dive Alaska. These guys were much more technical and require a lot out of their students.

I signed up for the next open water sessions, which are a weekend of dives in Whittier and a couple more pool dives.

Not only would I be getting my dives completed in the ocean, in February, but also in a dry suit and the certification that comes with that.

It had been almost a year since I have breathed underwater so it took a little bit to get my sea legs back. By the time we were in Whittier it was the middle of a massive snow storm where it dumped six inches of snow while we were underwater for our first dive!

I will admit it was a rough weekend. We couldn’t figure out the extra weight I needed to carry for me to sink. I know, if you have never done this you are thinking–you are crazy to want to sink to the bottom of the ocean!

By the time we figured out the weights, I thought I had 38 extra pounds on me. It ended up being 49 pounds.

I had so much weight that I couldn’t keep my head above water with my BC (sort of like a lifejacket that you inflate and deflate to keep yourself buoyant while diving) on. I felt like I was drowning every time we were on the surface of the water while we were waiting to do the next skill.

Underwater it was so awesome! There is no feeling like it in the world than to be literally floating in a world that many will never see.

The first day was rough but I felt good after I quit shivering. My dry suit did not remain dry and had quite a bit of water in it when I took it off. I finally got warm and headed back to Anchorage to the hotel.

Guess what was on that night? Creature from the Black Lagoon. I’m not making this stuff up. It just had to be!

Day two in the ocean was rough but I made it through the last two dives and the group headed to the local bar to debrief and learn we were certified divers!

YES! All of this for one reason–to dive with Great Whites in Mexico this fall. I can’t wait.

I was driving home in a blinding snow storm and this song came on SirusXM radio, Walk on the Ocean by Toad the Wet Sproket, a 90s classic. Again, I am not making this stuff up. Take a listen. Some call it irony. I call it premonition. What do you think?

Are you a certified diver? Let’s hear about your first dive and walking on the ocean.

Winter Expedition

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After months of planning, the first winter expedition class will be held through the University of Alaska Anchorage HPER Department.

Here is the course info:

2 credit course through UAA

Only EIGHT (8) spots are available!

Cost: $1000 and that includes all course tuition and fees

This course took over a year of planning to develop and we are excited to offer this opportunity. This is the only course in the UAA system like this. You do not need to be a full-time college student to take part but you will need to be registered as a non-degree seeking student. Contact UAA for details on this. You will need departmental approval. If you are interested in going let me know and I can give you more info on how to get this.

Schedule

Early November: Registration more info on dates can be found here:  UAA Spring Calendar

January 20: Pre-trip planning. This class will meet 6-9pm at UAA and we will go over the trip, planning, logistics, training, gear, paperwork and more.

February 18-19: Boot Camp/Skills Assessment. This will be held at Team Ineka in Willow. We will spend a night in the woods and will teach you everything you need to know about fat bikes, snow machines, dog mushing and more.

We will start the trip on Saturday March 11 by meeting as a group at Team Ineka.

March 11: Eaglequest Lodge. We are renting a cabin here at Eaglequest and they are going to provide an all you can eat spaghetti dinner. Breakfast will be available the next morning before we hit the trail.

March 12: Eaglequest to Yentna Station. We will travel approximately 35-40 miles on the river to Yentna Station. We will be staying in one of the cabins. Food will be available. The folks at Yentna are know for their world famous burgers!

March 13: Yentna to Talvista. We will travel via river and trail to the Talvista Lodge were we will enjoy a comfortable night which includes a prime rib dinner and a bonfire. This segment is also 35-40 miles.

March 14: Talvista to Eaglesong. We will travel overland to the famous Eaglequest Lodge. Dinner will be available. This segment is also about 35 miles.

March 15: Eaglesong to Redshirt. We will travel overland and on the rivers as we head toward the Nancy Lake Recreation Area where we will be staying in one of the public use cabins near Red Shirt Lake. Meals will be on you. Again about 35 miles.

March 16: Willow/Depart. This will be the last day of our trip and a relatively short run from Red Shirt Lake, around the Willow Swamp Trail and ending at the Willow Community Center. We will then return back to Team Ineka to unload the dog teams and the gear.

March 20: Debrief/Trip reports. We will meet at 6-9pm at UAA. This is a college course so their will be homework! Each day will will have “assignments” that we talk about on the trail. We will ask participants to provide an evaluation and a course end assignment that is due on this night in class.

The Power of Your Mind in Dog Training

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By Robert Forto

Next  week we will have an encore airing of one of most popular shows, Mind-Body Dog Training on the Dog Works radio. If you want to change the way your dog performs this is something you will not want to miss.

Think about it, you are about to head into the ring for a big obedience match or a conformation show. Of course you are nervous. You have worked so hard for this big day. Up until now you and your dog have been in perfect synchronicity. Haven’t you? You have done your pre-game prep and you are up next.

Then something catches your dogs eye and your whole dog training world comes crumbling down. Your dog gets spooked, you tense up and your dog pulls away. Your run in the ring ends in chaos and you are disqualified. Something you have worked so hard on for the past two years: all of those individual lessons with your private trainer, the perfect pick of the litter puppy, all that money, gone in an instant!

What if you could change that just by harnessing the power of your mind? No, I am not talking about some freakish mind over matter, late night TV infomercial garbage. I am talking about a centuries old process known as Neuro Linguistic Programing (NLP). In a sense it is a model of how we communicate and our personality. While this process has been around for centuries, the NLP model was developed in the 1970’s by Richard Bandler, John Grinder and others. This model explains how we process the information that comes from our outside world. Their belief is “the map is not the territory.” And so the internal representations that we make about an outside event are not necessarily the event itself.

Makes sense doesn’t it? Even in dog training we can use this process to make you and your dog the the best team in the world. Even if you don’t compete and just have a “lazy mutt” that likes to play fetch in the back yard.

You see, Dr. Robert Forto is a practitioner of NLP, and his training school, Denver Dog Works has a motto: We have the best and train the best. By employing the processes of NLP in our training programs we too can make your dog one of the best too. This is cutting edge training in the dog training world. Nobody does this and that is why they can not hold claim to our title.

Do you want to see how it works? Here’s how. Typically what happen is that there is an external event (your dog getting spooked in the ring) an we then run that event though our internal processing. We then make an Internal Representation (I/R) of that event. That I/R of the event combines with a physiology and that creates a state. “State” refers to our emotional state–a happy state, a sad state, a motivated state, or in our case with our dog in the ring, and anxious state. Our I/R includes our internal pictures, sounds and dialogue and our feelings (for example, whether we feel anxious and challenged in our dog’s training and performance). A given state is the result of the combination of an internal representations and a physiology. So what happens is that an event comes through our sensory input channels which I can teach you in NLP training and training your dog to be the best.

After the event becomes an I/R it is how our mind processes this information and the outcome that is achieved. We use filters in our mind to accomplish this and this is where the real power of NLP comes into play. For example I am just going to talk about one: Beliefs. Beliefs are generalizations about how our world is. One of the important elements in the NLP model is to find out a persons beliefs about a particular behavior we are trying to model. Richard Bandler says “Beliefs are those things we can’t get around.” Beliefs are the presuppositions that we have about the way of the world us that we either create or deny personal power to us. So beliefs are essentially our on/off switch for our ability to do anything in the world. In our dog training example. Make you and your dog the best dog team ever! Wouldn’t that be great? Go into the ring and get a qualifying score every time? Heck yes it would!

So if you would like to find out more about mind-body dog training, I highly encourage you to give us a call. We truly to have the best and train the rest. Do you want to win too? Yes you do!

Citation: The Accelerated NLP Practitioner Certification Training Manual

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Robert Forto is the host of The Dog Works Radio Show and is the training director of Alaska Dog Works. Robert Forto can be reached through his website at www.alaskadogworks.com

The Future of Iditarod Dreams: Team Ineka-Part 3

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The Future of Iditarod Dreams- Team Ineka Part 3

“Congratulations!! You own a home in Alaska! The Deed was just recorded”

Text from Dave S. realtor and friend  on July 20, 2010

So now the journey begins. Only just one week after the passing of our dear friend, our dog Ineka, and the inspiration for Team Ineka and the future of our Iditarod dreams, Michele and I are now officially the proud owners of a home (or is it just a musher’s cabin?) in the great state of Alaska.

I have thought about this day almost every day since I was about 19 years old, almost 20 years to the day. That was when I drove from Oregon to the Georgia mountains to look at a couple Siberian Huskies. It was a 72 hour drive in my 1975 Datsun 280z and I thought I owned the world. When I arrived in Georgia, I didn’t know the first thing about sled dogs or the sport of dog sledding but I did knew about Siberians, having owned one since 1987, his name was Axl (yes, after Guns and Roses lead singer Axl Rose, who was my favorite band at the time).

When I arrived at the breeder’s home, strung out from the road (wait… isn’t that a lyric from  a Bob Seger/Metallica cover song?) I was just expecting to take a look a a couple dogs. As a matter of fact I had no real intentions of purchasing them. I was heading to Florida to bask in the sun, not be a teenager held down by a couple sled dogs.

I  drove up and looked the pack of dogs over and one caught my eye. He was a red and white male with what I would call yellow eyes and then I saw his brother, a typical black and white Siberian Husky with a brown eye and a blue eye. I had money in my pocket but still not ready to buy until the lady said, “Do you want to go for a ride?”

“Sure,” I said and she and her son began hooking up a team of Siberians to a cart. After the dogs where hooked up and banging at the harnesses the lady could barely contain the feisty dogs that I thought were possessed! She jumped in the seat and told me to jump on the back and her son let go of the quick release. Away we went down a steep curve and almost toppling over (funny that same thing happened just about a month ago when I was visiting April Wood of Jaraw Siberians in California when we took her dogs out for a run).

After a couple miles the dogs settled into their gait and were pulling in sync and the lady asked if I would like to give it a try. I said of course and to my dismay (and soon to be pleasure) she jumped off the cart and we took off again. I had listened to her commands and as soon as I started barking out orders to the team they quickly responded. I have no idea how long I spent driving those dogs through the mountains of Georgia but something changed in me that day. Something primal, something connecting. Some call it the Musher’s Bug. It is true once it is in your veins it is hard to shake.

I picked up the breeder a short distance from her dog yard and she guided the team into the kennel with expert grace and we all chipped in on un-harnessing the team, watering them and just spending time with them in the yard.

I left that day with two pups, that I would soon call Rutgrr (the red one) and Ryche. Their full AKC names would soon be Rutgrr the Grreat (like the old Tony the Tiger cereal commercials) and King Ryche (named after another big rock band of the time, Queensryche). I soon bought a bicycle designed for the elderly and began training my pups. Very soon two dogs became four and four became eight. If you are a musher you know just how quickly they multiply, something like they taught us in high school biology class…

In the mid 1990’s I moved to Minnesota and began mushing with a team of thirty five Siberians with hopes of one day running the Iditarod. I ran on the snowmobile trails in the middle of the night so I wouldn’t get run over by the snow machines” running up to 45 miles most nights. During the day I was dabbling in the stock market as a day trader. The Internet was becoming really hot and just about anyone could make money in the market. What a perfect life, right?

Then I met Michele who lived in Denver and I had to “grow up” fast. I ended up moving to Colorado and put my sled dog dreams on hold for what I like to call, “life getting in the way”.

Fast forward to 2010. Michele and I are now married for almost a decade, we have a successful business and the kids are getting older. I got a chance to go to Alaska for a conference and the ceremonial start of the Iditarod and that changed our lives forever. Soon, we were talking to realtors and making plans to head to Alaska to look at a property that used to be an Iditarod kennel. We signed the purchase agreement sight unseen with the provision that we would approve after we looked at the place.

On July 4th weekend, my daughter and I (she had never been on a plane) flew to Alaska and looked at the place. I needed Nicole there because she was the lone hold-out in committing to move up North. She approved of the place and the cool high  school she will be attending and we sent word by text message to mom that we were buying the place.

Within sixteen days, the purchase was finalized and I was making plans of heading up at the end of the month to start work on the place (it needs remodeling really bad!) while Michele and the kids stay in Denver for a year to make sure that our business will have a successful transition when all all move to Alaska part-time (six months in Alaska and six months in Denver) in 2011.

During the next year I will be attempting something I am not good at all, construction, and begin to build our dog team. My goal is to qualify in 2012 for the 2013 Iditarod and run the race under the Team Ineka banner, named after our dear friend. I don’t know if I will have my own team by then or will lease a team from a friend of mine, but either way I am on track for something I have thought about since I was 19 years old. Some may call this my mid-life crisis. I don’t think so. and I don’t care if I ever have a corvette. I am chasing my dream and I will see where the trail leads. Hopefully to Nome…

Never Forget Your Dreams!

Next segment: Way Up North to Alaska

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Dr. Robert Forto is the Dog Sledding Examiner, a musher training for his first Iditarod under the Team Ineka banner and the host of the popular radio program, Mush! You Huskies.