The Iditarod has been described as a chess match
where all the players move at once and you can only see your pieces. It is subtle, nuanced, and incredibly
complex. But given that there are a few
basic principles that apply.
First you are only as fast as your slowest dog. An example of that was the 1996 Iditarod in
Kaltag where Jeff King dropped a dog because he worked too hard. Sounds crazy, but because that dog worked so
hard he needed extra rest. Jeff couldn’t
convince him to ease off. When the rest
of the team was ready to leave Kaltag, this dog was still resting. So Jeff left him behind. That was one of many decisions that
contributed to Jeff’s win that year.
Dropping a dog can help the team go faster. The more dogs in the team the more power you
have. In bad trail conditions and/or
hills that might equate to speed. But on
a hard fast level trail, once you reach a minimum number to pull the sled
(maybe 6 to 8 dogs), it doesn’t make any difference.
Second, if you over run your dogs, they will slow
down. Then they will not recover their
earlier speed during that race. During
training, each dog team negotiates among themselves to come up with a preferred
traveling pace. Something they are
comfortable with and that leaves them some reserves after the long runs the
musher puts on them in training.
Frequently the musher slows them down even more. The faster you run the harder it is on the
body and the longer a rest you need to recover and maintain that speed.
If you run the dogs further than they are trained
for, this negotiated speed is too fast.
Then the dogs need extra rest to recover. If you cut their rest too to keep up with
another team, they don’t have the reserves they need to maintain that
negotiated speed and they slow down.
Take them over that edge and extra rest at the next stop, even your 24
hour rest, will not be enough to get that original speed back. One of the first signs a musher will see is
dogs that lose some of their appetite. A
team where all the dogs eat like wolves is feeling good and ready to keep
racing.
Every competitive musher walks a knife edge in his
run rest cycle. Give the dogs more rest
than they need and you leave time on the table (you could have finished
faster). Don’t give them as much rest as
they need and you slow down and are no longer competitive.
This brings us to the third strategy of the
race. The strong teams will try to draw
the slightly weaker teams into keeping up with them and blowing up their dog team. That means driving them hard enough they lose
that original speed they had. Then the
other team is no longer a threat.
Of course the other side of that is that you might
have misjudged your team and will blow them up in the effort. It is kind of like a game of “chicken”
crossed with “catch me if you can”. If
you have a strong team that you have run conservatively (not too fast or long and
a little extra rest), that is eating well and feeling righteous, you can cut
corners (rest), pull off long runs (if you’ve trained for that), and dare the
other teams to try to follow you. For
each musher, knowing how fast to run, how long to run at that speed, and how
long to rest your particular dog team after that run is the crux of the
problem. Each team is different. Of course the strengths of the musher play
into this also. Optimizing the run/rest
strategy and keeping it optimized as conditions (weather, dogs health, mushers
health, trail surface, etc.) change is one of the real challenges mushers face
on the Iditarod Trail.
Keep ‘em Northbound
Eric
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