Willow Re-Start—Mushers depart at 2PM

The Willow Re-start begins at 2PM.  Mushers leave at two minute intervals in an order determined by a draw held at the Musher Banquet on this past Thursday evening.  The Clock starts for each musher at their designated start time, even though they may find themselves delayed in getting to the starting chute.

Obviously, mushers are not going to give away time by being late for the start.  But it has happened after a tow line breaks or a dog slips a harness, and the musher spends five minutes running around the parking lot in full winter gear locating the escapee.

It is true that the start order has some competitive advantage, but it has nothing to do with final time.   All the time will be adjusted when the musher’s declare their mandatory 24 hour rest somewhere on the trail.  At this time, a mathematic Iditarod sleuth will make sure the times out of the rest will even the time.   Thus, musher number 2 will stay 26 hours 12 minutes, while musher number 66 will stay exactly 24 hours  (maybe I am off a couple of minutes, but it’s all figured out.)

But, what is important is position to the front of the pack relative to trail conditions.  Therefore, Martin Buser, 4x Iditarod champ. should be pleased that he is going out first.   This means he could theoretically lead the pack through some dicey areas of the trail the first two days of the race.  The Happy Valley steps (wild descent) and the Dalzell Gorge come to mind as areas where it would be an advantage to be the first mushers on the trail.

The reason is obvious and well known.  With each passing team the trail degrades as brake tines dig a trench in a tricky area or the weight of the sled breaks ice as it will almost certainly do in the Dalzell Gorge.   By the time the back of the pack arrives, the trail could be a mess.  All the work done by the trail crew could be in disarray.

Trail update this Sunday Morning

Six Iditarod trail breakers began working their way through the Dalzell Gorge this last Saturday afternoon.  As much as possible they have been repairing creek crossings, but it’s still going to be rough going, according to my informants.  “Six guys can do a lot, but they can’t do a trail construction project on the Dalzell Gorge.  Each musher and team is going to do a little damage to the trail.”

An iditarod trail breaker team tries to stay about 24 hours ahead of the lead musher.  Once they lay down a trail there normally will not be any more work done on the trail, which is the only fair way to have a trail.  If the lead musher survives a couple of bad spots, it would be unfair to fix the trail for following mushers.

In this year’s instance, the trail through the Dalzell definitely favors the first mushers because they will be travelling on relatively good crossings over the creek.  In previous articles, it was explained that ice over the creek is fragile and in some places shattered, revealing a deep hole to the creek bottom.  This is a dicey development for teams trying to negotiate some angled approaches and gets worse the further back in the pack.  Therefore, top teams will try to forge to the front and avoid collateral damage.

 

Martin Buser in the Parking Lot—Leads the Pack out of the ReStart

9:56AM, I find Martin Buser in the nearly empty dog lot.  “If you are starting out first, you better get here first,” Martin reports as he pulls an elegant all wood sled from his dog truck.”  Distinct from the aluminum runner and stanchioned sled of other mushers, Martin prefers the flexibility of wood.  “Over time, the aluminum runners and stanchions will break. “

Note the elaborate laminations of carbon fiber and fiberglass and special plastic sled runner glued to the wood runner.  A special railing in the plastic allows Martin to quickly change his plastic.  In fact, while we are talking he replaces some used plastic with some new red plastic, which I am informed, slides in warm conditions.  He has other varieties of plastic for colder weather (all the mushers have this ability, but on different systems.)

Asked about his schedule and the Dalzell he confirmed that he felt better going in front of the pack.  Of course, he wouldn’t tell me about the details of his schedule, but he did comment that his strategy is very accurate.  “A couple of years ago I arrived in the Iditarod checkpoint only a minute off my schedule.  What was more amazing, my scheduled rest time was only off by a minute.”  His wife had his schedule and was equally surprised.

Jason Mackey

Jason Mackey was preparing his sled for departure and had a great anecdote on new innovations.  Demonstrating how he was sitting on his “bicycle seat,”, content in the night air watching his team trot behind fellow musher Petit,  and just preparing to drink tea from his thermos, Jason described the moment the rope holding the seat to the rear stanchion broke.

“I was flat on my butt, sitting on the trail with my thermos in my hand.  My dog team was running down the trail without me.”   Jason got to his feet, screaming and chasing the team at a full sprint.  Ahead, Nikolas Petit was running another team but didn’t hear him.  “I figured he was listening to his IPod and couldn’t hear me, so I kept on running.  I thought my Iditarod was going to be over if the team got in a wreck without me.” 

Eventually he recoverd his team in a tangled ball on the trail.  Nikolas Petit had thrown out some snacks on the trail and Jason’s team decided to stop for a group feed.  Incredibly, the dogs were too busy eating to get in a brawl and he recovered his team undamaged.  Later he asked Nikolas if he had heard him bellowing to the mountains—and the answer was no.

Jason showed me how he had installed stronger rope to the seat.  After that experience, I wouldn’t trust the old rope either.

Incidentally, Jason (brother to champs Ric and Lance and champ Dick Mackey, his father) trains to Finger Lake, a checkpoint the lead mushers will reach early Monday morning, and added that “two inch pongee sticks of willows are sticking through the snow.  Its dangerous and hope the trail crew cut them back.”

AaronBurmeister

Aaron is always an interesting interview, as this top musher (4^th in 2012) has designed a feed ration which enables him to accurately measure calorie intake of his dogs in training.  Additionally, he follows with interest the data from his gps to determine optimal travelling speeds.  He demonstrated by clicking on a small gps unit on his sled handlebar which will show him distance travelled, average speed, and current speed.

 

Normally, he tells me, eating is a big problem because neighbors steal food and the occasional disagreement affects team peace.  Therefore, he actually clips his dogs to the towline with his necklines, while most mushers clip dogs to the towline. 

However, eating on the trail is a process, he tells me.  First, he determines in training that an overly energetic workout—say a 80 mile training run—can leave the dogs unenthused about eating.  Learning that, he tried reducing the travelling speed in training and saw that slower speeds and less stress resulted in hungrier dogs.

So, he has determined an optimal travelling speed.  For his purposes he told me, “They will never go over 9.2 miles an hour on this run.  That’s my safety zone.  If they go too fast, they won’t eat right away.  You soon learn that at the right speed they can cover big distances, but they will always be hungry and eat.”

He explained that the excitement of other teams and a new trail could get out of control.  “Its so hard to really determine travelling speed.  My gps tells me exactly what’s going on with team speed.  Within two or three miles, the team will be at a trot, but I still don’t know how fast they are really moving.”

Asked about Leaders from the  Restart, Aaron said, “Two leaders will be slow ones and I’ll them all the way over the Alaska Range.  Maybe at Nikolai (finally the trail is flat in the Yukon River Basin) I’ll switch out to some faster leaders.

Kelley Griffin

Kelley Griffin was in the dog light organizing her sled.   Knowing that she had made attempts in previous Iditarods to reach the half way point at Iditarod checkpoint, I asked her if she was up for the shot at the Half Way Prize of gold nuggets again.  “I was even thinking about going to Anvik,” a point just more than halfway at about 520 miles which offers a money  prize for first to the Yukon River.

Well, Kelley is my heroine.  She probably wont be a front running team to win, but she has a very good team that could nail prizes at Iditarod and Anvik.  Why would she beat the front runners?  The front runners may decide to play it conservatively and take their 24 hour break in Takotna (just a third of the way) and allow middleof the pack mushers to flex their team muscle.

The only catch is you have to be gutsy.  So, I give Kelley lots of credit and hope she has the opportunity to take the lead, if only temporarily.

 Drug TEsting

 

Dr. Morrie Craig, a world renown toxicologist and veterinarian, directs a testing lab at Oregon State University and is responsible for drug testing at Iditarod. His team collects urine from most of the dogs in the lot (averages 6 to 8 dogs per team, a sample rate which insures reliability) by simply strapping on a collection bag to the dog.  The system works well, surprising observers who would initially judge it impossible.

A chain of custody takes the samples from the dog light to the Oregon State Lab in Corvallis, Oregon.  New equipment, Dr. Craig explained, can now evaluate large numbers of samples.

Scratched Musher Ed Stielstra

 

Ed told me he had set up his new dog yard with a number of 4 inch steel posts positioned so that he could anchor his dog team before and after training runs.  On a recent training run, Ed had snubbed his sled to a post and harnessed the team.  Wild with exuberance, at night, he leaned down to pull the snub line and release the team.   At the same time, his head lamp slipped over his head, he grabbed for the head lamp, lost his balance, flipped the sled, while his accellerating team pile drived his head in post number 1.  Breaking teeth and losing part of his tongue, he still held on to the team, and collided with post number 2, definitively altering the landscape on his forehead (see photo.)

Like Jason Mackey, Ed was bummed out that he had lost his team.  “I never lose a team.”  Several hours later Ed was delivered to a physician and glued back together, not withstanding blurred vision and a blow to his powers of concentration.  “I am assured I am getting better,” said the always amusing Stielstra.