Completing Iditarod

I do okay in winter in the city or out in the countryside. I'm not keen on minus temperatures, but I'll live, especially when I have an insulated room to get back to with a warm bed and bathroom. But this girl from the tropics isn't hot about hiking in winter or trudging through miles of snow to get to somewhere scenic with more white and ice.

I certainly don't have it in me to train dogs and myself to last even a 100-mile sled race in the dead of winter, let alone complete the 1000-mile Iditarod. Reading writer and adventurer + dogsled racer Blair Braverman's account of training for Iditarod as a rookie in 2018 and then completing and coming in 36th in 2019 (52 mushers competed, and only 17 were women), her stories of #UglyDogs and her thoughts put a smile on my face. It wasn't just about racing. She was also raising money for school children in Alaska. She has put thought into training, shows genuine concern for her dogs, and considers all possibilities and plan ahead for race completion. I've gone on sleds pulled by dogs, and luckily for us, on this trip, we stayed with the family who own the dogs and sleds, and we could see for ourselves how the dogs were treated.

Published in Outside on April 24, 2019, 'Blair Braverman on the Iditarod, Fear, and Resilience', this was such a thrilling read. I'm comforted that in this account, from her Twitter and Instagram updates, her sled dogs seem well-treated, although she didn't mention injuries, rehabilitation or losses. Blair Braverman's lead dog Pepé is smart and strong, and has gone through the two Iditarods with her; all the dogs are now back home in northern Wisconsin. To feel free running wild on the trail in Alaska with your dogs on the sled. Wow.

Next came miles of bare tussocks that my lead girl, Pepe, loved and my knees hated. At the Iditarod checkpoint, an isolated ghost town that marks the race’s official halfway mark, warm weather had thawed the meat in my drop bags so we made do with kibble. This was the beginning of a hot-weather stretch of above-freezing temperatures that made the trail slushy and everything else wet. We spent 38 hours traveling up the frozen Yukon River in the rain, dodging pools of open water. We forded creeks that felt like rivers. We reached the bottom of endless hills, and I would lift my headlamp to see the trail markers, bright reflective specks, rising back up into the stars. I told myself constantly that the next checkpoint would be the finish line. All we needed to do was get there. After eating and resting, we didn’t keep going; we got up and started over. Our race ended and began a thousand times. 

In Shaktoolik, a village of 257 on the shore of the Bering Sea, I found an envelope that a friend—Chrissy, the cook at Alpine Creek Lodge, where my husband and I trained our dogs last winter—had tucked into my drop bag. “It doesn’t get easier,” she wrote. “You get stronger.” This struck me as the most profound thing I’d ever seen. Because I’d seen the dogs get stronger, day after day. Ever since we crossed the Alaska Range, they’d started getting a little less tired after each long run, a little more confident, a little bouncier. They were efficient. They developed incredible appetites, with each dog devouring up to three pounds of meat per meal. They rested when they could, napping at river crossings while I waded into the frigid water in search of the best place to ford, then got up quickly when it was time to go. They bonded as a team, trusting each other’s senses, sleeping in cozy piles with their heads on each other’s necks. I could see them growing, adapting, with each mile.

As an ideal, completing the Iditarod is totally a challenge for the musher/racer, and the dogs. It's billed as a race for elite athletes (humans and dogs). Nobody sane goes into this race untrained and emerge unscathed. I'd like to think that humans would place their dogs' interests above all else. However, this might not be the case anymore. (Also, horse racing.) In the race's 46-year history, the canine death count is chilling. The the annual 1000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is tough and in all likelihood, cruel to the dogs. A race like this obviously has sponsors, along with lucrative prizes ($500,000 spread across the top 30 finishers), and its accompanying doping scandals in the name of winning.

In the recent years, Iditarod has been the focus of animal rights advocates. I watched 'Sled Dogs' (released 2016). It was a very sad documentary. The film produced by Fern Levitt flagged the abuse of sled dogs by mushers and handlers. Many puppies-in-training don't make it, and many trained dogs pulling sleds suffer horrific injuries. Ripped paws are the norm. To be very honest, I don't see a point to do Iditarod anymore if it means so many canine deaths and debilitating injuries. Not when dogs have to run 50km EVERY DAY to complete the 1000 miles within 8 to 15 days. That's crazy. It can be done, but we should ask ourselves, why? Why push our dogs along with us? What glory is there to seek?