No, this isn't about basketball. I have no interest in basketball at all. This is my version of March Madness - the Iditarod.
I haven't been following as closely as I usually do, I forgot to renew my membership when I had disposable income and I'm haing to watch from the cheap seats - what's available for free. I miss the gps tracker the most, I could see where the mushers were whenever I wanted to, now I have to wait for the udated check in list. Oh, well. It's still exciting, I'm just not glued to computer like I usually am. Anyway, it's the last third of the race for the front runners.
It's been a rough one this year, trail conditions have been horrible in the most dangerous areas. Fifteen mushers have scratched at this point, many of them frequent front runners and contenders, most of them with injuries that left them unable to care for their dogs. The Farewell burn and Dalzell Gorge got most of them. Even in good years, The Burn is fairly windswept without a lot of snow, this year it was bare. Jeff King fimed himself going through the Dalzell Gorge with a helmet cam. Not much snow, and he spent most of his time tipped over and being dragged by his dogs. One guy dislocated his knee and is still mushing, he's in the top ten at the moment. Front runner at the moment is one of my favorites - Aliy Zirkle. She's come in second the past two years. Hoping she makes a first this year.
The Iditarod is one of those sporting events where gender and age don't have much of an impact on outcome. Most of the winners and front runners are older, lots of them in their forties and fifties. Experience and wisdom, strategy and head games, and how well the dogs are cared for seem to be the major factors. And luck. Luck is a big factor in a 1000 mile race in extreme weather conditions. Sportsmanship is seen daily - mushers stop and help one another when their teams get loose, when someone's injured (Newton Marshall stopped to help a musher with a broken leg and waited with him until the helicopter arrived to airlift him out, losing several hours that he'll never make up), they pick up spilled gear they find on the trail and return it.
And this is why I'm hooked.
I love that I have a friend who is into Iditarod. It makes me cooler. 
No but seriously, I think that's awesome.
Some day I want to be a checkpoint volunteer. That's maybe #1 on my bucket list.
that would be really exciting!
The iditarod seems like such an interesting thing to be a part of.
Ouch! My brother dislocated his knee a while back, he described the whole experience as one of the top painful moments of his life.
What amazes me is that the guy (Aaron Burmeister) is currently running ninth. He popped it back in himself and just kept going, and that was over 300 miles ago! Most people think tht mushers just stand on the runners and the dogs do all the work, but in most cases, the mushers are either running between the runners of the sled or kicking/poling to help the dogs along. One guy ran the race with broken ribs, one finished on a broken ankle. They'll put up with all kinds of injuries to themselves as long as they can still take proper care of the dogs. And the dogs are checked by vets at every checkpoint and will be "dropped" if they're not in peak shape. They're taken care of at each checkpoint until they can be airlifted to Anchorage, where they're taken care of by prisoners until they can be picked up after the race.
Look at them doggies!
I'll follow that over Basketball any day!
Check out the Run, Dogs, Run! series of videos at Iditarod.com. They're pretty good.
I'm looking at the Race Map right now and imagining how cool a video game of this would be.
I'm not able to watch the Run Dogs Run stuff 'cause I apparently need to be an Insider, but I did watch this on youtube.
Ever read The Call of the Wild by Jack London? I read that last year. Not about racing, but about working dogs (fictionalized) pulling sleds in the Great White North.
I've been a dogsled junkie since I was a little, little kid. Read every book I could get my hands on about sled dogs - Call of the Wild, White Fang, Silver Chief, and a bunch of YA books that I can't remember titles of now. There's a mystery series about a female musher - Murder on the Iditarod Trail, Yukon Quest, etc. by Sue Henry. I've also read a bunch of non-fiction about dog sledding. Gary Paulson's Winter Dance is a really good read, it's about his experience training for and running the Iditarod. Iditarod Classics and More Iditarod Classics are short essays/interviews about many of the better known mushers. And there's a book in my reading backlog called The Cruelest Mile about the serum run to Nome that was the inspiration of the modern Iditarod. Yeah, I'm not obsessed or anything...
That's a cool video. Dallas Seavey is a third generation musher and grew up mushing. He's won the Iditarod, the Yukon Quest, and the Jr. Iditarod. He's not the only multigenerational musher, either - Rohn Buser, the Mackeys, and I think there are a couple more.
There's certainly a lot of literature out on the subject. Cruelest Mile looks interesting.
This does look like a really cool event. I should try to look into it more. I will try to later if I can.
My son made up a joke because of the Iditarod today...
Where do sled dogs come from?
Mush-again
Travis, it's an amazaing event. I've been following it since I was seven or eight, which would have been in 1976 or 1977. Mostly because there was a sprint race on Lake Winnipesaukee that my grandparents took me to watch a couple of times and the family down the street organized one on the lake I grew up on one year. ABC's Wide World of Sports used to do a lot of race coverage, and I remember watching Susan Butcher win her first Iditarod in 1986. She went on to win three more. And she wasn't the first woman to win, either, Libby Riddles won in 1985, and the first woman to finish was Mary Shields in 1974, the second Iditarod ever run.
It's an education-friendly event, too, they have class room teaching tools and every year one teacher gets to be "Teacher On the Trail". I think Michael117's class followed them one year when he was a kid.
Liked your son's joke, by the way.
It sounds pretty cool. Apparently they talked about it in my son's class, which was a little surprising. Didn't think anyone paid attention to the Iditarod down here in Texas!
My version of the Itidarod:
I don't think it quite works that way, lol.
what a trip that I came across your Iditarod blog....I'm fiending hard right now for more Alaska shows to hit Netflix.
Something about watching people live a subsistane lifestyle is super-entertaining.
Hey Dan! Good to see you here!
Netflix streamed a six episode documentary about the Iditarod several years ago that was pretty good. I don't think they have it any more, though :(
I never understood the Iditarod, but after some explaination from my uncle, I respect what the particpants do. Here in my part of the country, you only hear a 30 sec blurb about the winner.
Chris, you should check out the Iditarod website sometime. They have a great section that talks about the history of the race and what they were trying to accomplish by starting the race. And I highly recommend Gary Paulsen's book Winterdance.
And we get about that here in Maine, too. I follow on the website and on Facebook, otherwise I'd get no news other than two lines hidden somewhere in the local paper about the winner.
Never hear about such things anymore these days. i recall hearing about this in the news or during sport segments in my local news, but nothing now a days.
I have to keep up with it on the Iditarod website. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, there might be a line or two in the paper about who won, but none of the stuff that makes the race so fascinating to me.