During the winter between Moth and Cobweb’s puppy season and their yearling season we started to develop our own and still largely unique way of training racing whippets.

I’d read all the available books I could find on training racing whippets and it didn’t amount to a handful. There was a chapter in C H Douglas-Todd’s book on the breed and one in Phil Drabble’s Of Pedigree Unknown. Both described how dogs were trained in the 1930s when the sport as a betting medium was in its heyday. At that time whippets were prepared much like fighting dogs were, walked straining at the leash and into their specifically designed wide collars to build muscle. Reduced in weight by restricting food and then sharpened up with sprints and the best quality meat money could buy. Pauline Wilson’s seminal text on Whippet Racing – Whippets Rearing and Racing – written in the early seventies brought things up-to-date. Brilliant though the book is, Pauline’s view that all racing whippets needed in terms of exercise was a few miles of walking each day and a scamper around off the lead was hardly going to move the dial in terms of performance.

I’d also spoken to John Collins and Steve Rowell who had the best dogs at the Portsmouth club we frequented and had both had Supreme Champions in the past. They freely admitted that they trained completely differently. John never walked his dogs and lured them twice-a-week as well as trialling them at the club on Wednesday and racing on Sunday. Steve walked his dogs morning and night on the lead with a Jack Russell lose in front to encourage them to pull and trialled them on Wednesdays as well as racing on Sundays.

I also read up on how some of the top greyhound trainers prepared their dogs. George Curtis of Ballyregan Bob fame just let his out to play in pairs in the paddock at the track for 10 minutes three or four times a day. Ger McKenna the legendary Irish trainer galloped his every day.

Until this time I had sort of mixed the old fashioned style of whippet training – walking and throwing a ball for them to sprint after – with what Flying Doll and Rosie Black (Bess) had taught me. They got themselves fitter than I ever could through walking by chasing rabbits. Moth and Cobweb had spent their first year free-running after rabbits and chasing tennis balls.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that whippets are akin to human 100m sprinters, they ran about the same times as a human runs for 100m in their for 175y races, and that the training of the human athlete was probably more advanced than that of either whippets or greyhounds. Henceforth our methods have been a mixture of what the dogs like doing, which essentially is free-running, and an adaptation of human sprint training methods as far as it is possible to get the dogs to replicate them. Whippets for instance cannot be taught to do drills, but they can do hill sprint repeats and they can be induced to do resisted sprints on the lead like a human sprinter sprints pulling a sled.

Our first little human protocol was to introduce plyometrics to Moth and Cobweb. It so happened we had an extremely steep and twisting flight of about 20 steps made from railway sleepers in our back garden and we taught the dogs to race up the steps, me at the top with cheese, Gill at the bottom. Each step was like a plyometric bounce for them and they loved it. We did it every night when I came home from work.

I don’t think Moth ever actually won a race outside the Portsmouth club and by the time she was two-years-old we’d decided running her was too much hassle given her propensity to want to tackle dogs that were too fast for her.

Cobweb had never raced as a pup, but was a joy to handle at the races when we finally got her going. She was very quiet when the racing was on and always ran her heart out for you without causing any trouble. Open racing was very competitive in those days, especially for lightweight bitches and generally she’d run respectably but get beaten in her heat by one of the top dogs like Champion Of Champions Swift Ellie.

Swift Ellie had been the best pup around the previous year and came up for sale towards Christmas after that season was over when her owner decided to give up racing. Colin Edmunds who owned her was good friends with John Collins and Steve Rowell. John owned Strimmer the sire of Swift Ellie and Steve had bred Strimmer. Colin let them know Ellie was for sale and they suggested I buy her, but the call came too late and by the time I rang Colin she’d been snapped up by Dave Chapman. Ellie not only went on to become the best dog in the country, she also produced an even better bitch called Swift Holly in her first litter, which Dave kept and whose brother Montana became one of the links in probably the outstanding sire line in the history of whippet racing, which began with Good As Gold and is represented today by Midnight Dazzler.

There was no consolation racing for those that lost in their heat when we were racing Cobweb so if you did lose in your heat, which we invariably did, you’d get just the one race, which was a bitter pill given that most of the events took hours to get to. All the same, our two dogs would sit quietly in the car when other dogs were racing and we became spectators rather than participants and still enjoyed the day after our hopes had been dashed.

Cobweb qualified to run at the British Whippet Racing Association Championships, the biggest event in the calendar, which was restricted to dogs that finished first or second in their weight-group at their regional championships. We had gone to the “regionals” expecting Moth to qualify not Cobweb, but the opposite happened and Cobweb produced the first real signs of her potential by running a close second to a dog that was hoping to contend for its weight-group title at the championships. By this time Cobweb would have been just short of two-years-old. What we hadn’t really appreciated was that she’d been racing with fully mature dogs when still quite a youngster and steadily she’d improved to the point where she had become competitive. Perhaps our unique approach to training had helped along the way as well.

She ran quite well at the Championships getting through her heat and finishing a close third in the semi-final of her weight-class. At that time it was the best result I’d ever had since I’d started racing whippets.

My time spent as a spectator hadn’t gone to waste either because I had a pretty good idea of the hierarchy of all the open-race whippets and where Cobweb stood amongst them. I used that knowledge to go to events that would not attract the better dogs so we could avoid them, increasing our chances of winning a race here and there. It worked well and Cobweb started to win as often as she lost. There were three or four opens around the country each weekend and I’d scan the calendar working out which dogs would go where. Our season finished on our best ever result when I worked out that none of the dogs that would beat Cobweb were likely to go to a little open that was being held at Worcester WRC. It was a rainy day with only about 30 dogs present, but the sun shone on us that day. Cobweb took her opportunity with aplomb and we came away with our first trophy after winning the open outright. It was the only open she ever won, but I sort of knew that would be the case at the time and was thankful the cards had fallen in our favour.

In some ways I think we’d made our own luck. We probably helped to make Cobweb faster by introducing those plyometric sessions and were shrewd enough to know where she stood in context to her rivals and avoided those we couldn’t beat.

Moth and Cobweb were whippets of the old school, they mixed racing with rabbiting. They ended up sleeping on the bed and went pretty much everywhere with us except to work and the pub. Hunting nearly saw the end of Cobweb that winter when she ran into something chasing a deer and had to have about 40 stitches in her chest. The vet said that there were bits of muscle he had been unable to stitch back into place because it wasn’t apparent where they should go. It didn’t bode well for her having much of a racing career after that.