07/03/2026
LET’S TALK BEING FIT FOR DUTY.
88 degrees. 67% humidity. Full sun. Feels like 98. Perfect day for training. Yep, face it. The majority of callouts don’t come during ideal conditions. It always seems to be one extreme or another depending on the season. And I can’t tell you how many searches we’ve been on during a day just like this: hot, humid, and not a lick of shade. People don’t wait to get lost when it’s a cool, dry day. Which makes it critical to workout in these extremes, conditioning your body to perform when it’s being pushed to the limit. The victim’s life depends on it. So in addition to building our K9s’ stamina we have to build our own.
Today I took to the streets with a 20 lb ballistic vest (thanks Blaze Defense), shooting for 4 miles with a mix of hills and flat areas. When you do wilderness searches, being able to keep up with the K9s is important and they just love taking the steepest inclines, right? So you need to train for it.
Granted I’ve been training like this for several years. If you’re just getting started, you can build up gradually. Instead of a vest you can wear your backpack. Find a good hill in your neighborhood and just go up and down it a couple of times, varying your pace and stride. Then build from there. And of course, hydrate!
If you have any training tips or things you do prepare for the physical demands of SAR, comment below! I’ll be sharing more of my own workouts, too. After all, if we demand peak performance from our K9s we should expect no less from ourselves.
Janie
