Yukon King here, lead dog in three prior Iditarod’s, with todays RRRRace RRRReport. Make no mistake, we epitomize the endurance athlete–we pee on your Ironman Races! Bred, trained, special diets, and if we show promise, sometimes they don’t cut our nuts off! Yes, I know these races seem a little hard on the humans, special clothes, hats, gloves, diets, etc. just to survive, and, yes, sometimes we dogs make a miscalculation and they wind up getting rolled-over down an embankment with a few broken bones, or drowned in a frigid pond, but you can tell by the look on their faces that they love it. In fact, they are bred for it–many of these humans are second and third generation mushers.
Anyhowl–(get it???)–here are some more pictures taken as the race unfolds.
Here Blind musher Rachael Scordis leaves the Willow Restart line as the last musher to leave. This is not a joke, and I must admit I am not exactly sure how this works.
Here are some of my buddies. It might look like they are a little disorganized, but they are just playing “Cats-in-the-Cradle”. Drives the human’s heart rate up about 20 beats, then we form up and off we go!
Here are a couple of my buddies with one of the Women Mushers–Got room in the Hottie Thread?
Sometimes we show our appreciation and offer encouragement–
OK. I followed up on Rachel. I believe that her vision is 20/200, or that may have been the best it ever was. I didn’t belabor it, point is, she is legally blind. Here is how it works, as required by the Iditarod Board (or whatever it is called):
“Rachael would be allowed run the 1,200 mile continuous race and its qualifiers with a visual interpreter who, driving a second dog team and communicating via two-way radio, would ride ahead of Rachael to warn her of obstacles such as low hanging branches, broken ice and even moose on the trail. These are obstacles that a normally sighted musher would be able to see.”
Doesn’t measure up to sleeping in a bathtub for 60 hours while an autopilot flies you around the world on a jet engine, and meanwhile you have a headache for part of the way, but impressive nonetheless.
Thanks for the update…
btw, Rachel S.'s visual interpreter is a former pro wrestler, Paul Ellering. He is actually an Iditarod veteran. Still, driving a dog team can be tricky and very physical, even when you can see the trail. But apparently she has been sled racing since she was 3 yrs old (info from the Cabelas iditarod website).
Yukon King here, lead dog in three prior Iditarod’s, with todays RRRRace RRRReport. Make no mistake, we epitomize the endurance athlete–we pee on your Ironman Races! Bred, trained, special diets, and if we show promise, sometimes they don’t cut our nuts off! Yes, I know these races seem a little hard on the humans, special clothes, hats, gloves, diets, etc. just to survive, and, yes, sometimes we dogs make a miscalculation and they wind up getting rolled-over down an embankment with a few broken bones, or drowned in a frigid pond, but you can tell by the look on their faces that they love it. In fact, they are bred for it–many of these humans are second and third generation mushers.
