I really think that one of the biggest challenges that one has to overcome in finishing the Iditarod is sleep deprivation. You can train the dogs to run 30, 40, 50 mile legs, or longer and recover quickly on 4 to 5 hours of rest, then build a race strategy accordingly that will get you from start to finish. You can slowly, but surely climb over pretty much any mountain, even carrying dogs and equipment up and over one at a time if necessary. If the weather is bad you can sit in a checkpoint or shelter cabin and wait it out. Even if caught in a storm on the coast you can make snow caves for the dogs, use the sled as a barrier against the wind, crawl into your sleeping bag and let the storm blow through. Mandatory equipment is such that you should have everything in your sled, including a spare supply of dog food, to deal with pretty much any situation on the trail. But sleep deprivation is hard to combat and overcome and even harder to prepare for. It is important to get as much sleep and rest in the build-up to the race as possible but this is difficult with last minute preparations to make: drop bags to complete and deliver, ECGs and bloodwork for the dogs to attend, final vet checks on the Wednesday before the race, a day of pre-race meetings and an evening of start banquets on the Thursday. Even so close to the race it is important, in order to avoid injuries or myopathy, that the dogs continue to be exercised in the week leading up to the start. And then there is the constant revision of race strategy going on inside your head, mental checklists for gear, checkpoint routines, sled bag packing – your mind is constantly abuzz when really you should be sleeping or just chilling out. It is difficult to come into a race fully rested and things are even worse when you are coming into Iditarod off the Quest; two weeks between the finish of the Quest and the start of Iditarod may be plenty of time for the dogs to recover but it is just not enough time for the musher to recover physically, mentally or emotionally. Once the race has started it becomes even more difficult to get good sleep: if you stop for a 4 hour break on the trail the first hour is spent preparing food and sorting the dogs and sled out, the final 45 minutes repacking the sled and bootying the dogs, maybe offering a quick snack; if it is cold the time in between can be spent collecting firewood and trying to keep a fire going, or just lying in your sleeping bag trying to get warm. Checkpoints can be even worse where there is always the distraction of people to talk to, keeping sleep at bay. Typically the first couple of days on a 1000 mile race I will get two to three hours sleep a day; once we get into the routine of the race maybe four to five hours sleep per day. Even on the 24 hour layover on Iditarod you are up feeding every 6 hours, all the dogs have to be walked, stretched out, massaged etc. so sleep is both rare and precious. No matter how efficient you are or how experienced, sleep deprivation is ever present and it can have very many detrimental effects. Most obviously of course is the inability to stay awake on the runners, the very last thing you want to do is fall asleep when going along and the next thing you know you are coming to lying in the snow and your team are carrying on down the trail oblivious to your departure, and even less burdened by your weight (or is that just me). When you are exhausted, cocooned inside your parka all warm and cozy and with a face mask limiting the amount of fresh air you are taking it can be a constant struggle to stave off sleep. Secondly sleep deprivation can make you terribly inefficient, particularly if you haven’t practiced and practiced your checkpoint and dog care routines until they are second nature. There is nothing more amusing, as long as it is not happening to you, than watching the wandering, sleep deprived musher who will start at the sled, walk up to the front of the team, forget what he went there for, wander halfway back, remember, turn around, turn back again, and eventually will stand in the middle of the team for minutes at a time with the 1000 mile stare, not a clue what they were doing. I cannot count the amount of times I have unpacked a drop bag, taken out exactly what I think I need and then repacked it ready for return only to find myself unpacking it all again five minutes later looking for something fundamental; I can repeat this feat three or four times per checkpoint. Then there is the exploding sled bag: mushers are so tired and inefficient that as soon as they stop to camp their sled bag seemingly explodes its contents everywhere and the musher is stood in the middle of this mess wondering where anything is. The problem of inefficiency is that it greatly compounds the musher’s problems: it takes longer to do anything, longer to feed the dogs so they get less rest, it takes longer to complete all the chores so you get to spend less time sleeping and so sleep deprivation is compounded, it takes longer to get out of checkpoints and so your whole race strategy is impacted. Sleep deprivation can also have serious impacts on the mind to the extent that you can start making really bad decisions – there is a reason why mushers are told never to scratch when coming into a checkpoint, always delay the decision until after you have slept. It is remarkable how many times I have convinced myself that a dog is injured or a team is completely exhausted and finished, only to get a few hours valuable sleep and realise that the main problem with the team is inside my head. I left a camping spot on last year’s Yukon Quest on a high, thinking how great the dog team were and how well we were running – five hours later I was pulling in to the checkpoint convinced that we were finished, needed to go home and I would never run dogs again – there had been zero change in the team’s performance or attitude, I had just allowed my exhaustion to cloud my decision making process. Finally there are the hallucinations that I think every musher eventually succumbs to in some form or other. Often they are harmless, you can have conversations with people who are obviously not there, see animals and buildings that just don’t exist, trees can turn into vehicles then back to trees again. Mostly hallucinations can be harmless, sometimes though they can be quite disturbing.
Not only was the 2015 Iditarod going to be a new experience for me, being as it was our rookie year, it was going to be a new experience for pretty much all the field. Bad conditions through the Alaska Range in 2014 and very low snow conditions in 2015 saw Iditarod Trail Committee (ITC) make the sensible decision to shift the official race start from Willow, north to Fairbanks where the temperatures are normally much colder and snow depths traditionally more significant than in the south of the State. This would of course necessitate a new route with new checkpoints: instead of running through the traditional checkpoints such as Rainy Pass, Rohn, McGrath, Takotna etc., the race would begin in Fairbanks, run to Nenana (coincidentally the location for the start of the 1925 serum run relay), overland to Manley Hot Springs on to Tanana before taking what was thought to be a 120 leg, mostly on the Yukon River, to Ruby, where it would rejoin the traditional Iditarod northern before taking a historic mile-adding detour via Huslia, the one-time home of mushing legend George Attla and then back down to the Yukon River.
I described previously how we came into the 2015 Iditarod off a particularly grueling, and red lantern winning, Yukon Quest and as a consequence I had my first decent night’s sleep only two nights before the Iditarod Ceremonial Start. A very, very long and slow drive from Anchorage to Fairbanks after the Ceremonial Start ensured I had no sleep on the Saturday night and so came into the Monday restart in less than perfect mental condition – not the best way to begin a 1000 mile race let alone our first Iditarod. After a too warm Ceremonial Start the mercury in Fairbanks was heading down into the -40’s Celsius on start morning – cold like this just adds to the mental impairments caused by lack of sleep. Nonetheless we hit the trail as the first team out of the chute and made our way towards Nome. The run to Nenana was cold yet uneventful but with almost 80 teams in the field, and 60 miles from start to checkpoint, most teams decided to stop in Nenana for a few hours at least so the dog lot was compact and dog teams close together and the checkpoint building full. Running on adrenaline, with so many people to talk to, so many distractions, I made no effort whatsoever to sleep so as we slipped out into the night, and on the way to Manley Hot Springs, I was already descending into the realms of exhaustion.
Nenana to Manley was reported to be around 90 miles although nobody seemed that confident on any of the distances on this new route, which wasn’t great for planning strategies. Having run the Quest so many times now I have a pretty good feel for the trail, know the best places to camp on the trail, have a pretty good idea of how far we are from checkpoints at any time. On the 2015 Iditarod it was all guess work for myself and the majority of the field. About 40 miles from Nenana, and seeing that a lot of other teams were selecting that area to camp, I found a spot just off the trail and began my camping routine. The temperatures were still down in the low -30s or high -40s so even once I had bedded down, put jackets on and fed the dogs, sleep still evaded me. We pulled into Manley Hot Springs mid-morning on Tuesday, now into our second day of racing, starting to feel pretty tired and feeling the associated emotional mood swings starting to begin. The checkpoint building was quite a walk from the dog yard, nonetheless once I had the dogs sorted, I wandered into the community, found the checkpoint and grabbed a bite to eat; all conversations were focusing on rumours that something was going on with Brent and an alarm clock earlier in the day. I was too tired to worry about this and with sleeping bag in hand I wandered across the road to the school where it was reported the musher sleeping area could be. As with many checkpoints the sleeping area was in fact any spare place you could find on the floor – if you were lucky there may be a gym mat to sleep on, if not, it was the hard floor. No matter how hard I tried, sleep was impossible: mushers were coming and going all the time, official wake up calls being given, it was now midday so light was streaming into the gym, even ‘whispered’ conversations echoed around the cavernous complex. For about 30 minutes I tried to sleep; not helped by occasional leg cramps that always plague me on races, eventually I gave up and decided that I would make use of the school showers to at least try to clean up a bit (probably the first and last time I have had a shower whilst on the trail). When we hit the trail that afternoon for the sixty mile run to Tanana which I was planning on doing in one run, we had now been racing for over 36 hours and I had yet to have any sleep.
We arrived in Tanana early the following morning, the run overnight had been a struggle in trying to stay awake and I was drifting in and out of reality as we came into the checkpoint. All conversations were now on the fact that Brent had apparently been withdrawn for having an iPhone in his possession – at the time the Iditarod still maintained a rule that mushers were not to be in possession of two-way communications devices. Although Brent was using the iPhone for trail music someone had apparently seen him with it in Manley when he had used it as an alarm clock and reported this to race officials. I chatted to Brent just before he left Tanana to run his team home, such a dispiriting way for his race to finish, especially as it was rumoured that snow banks between Manley and Ruby would be full of phones as other mushers sought to avoid the same fate.
Still early in the race Tanana was no less busy than previous checkpoints but the checkpoint was small and the race official, Karen Ramstead had done a great job in sectioning off a sleeping area for mushers and was doing her best to keep that area as quiet as possible; I would guess I managed to sleep for about one hour before the desire for more food tugged me from my sleeping bag – a small victory!
We were told that Tanana to Ruby was going to be about 120 miles but in talking to other mushers estimates were wildly different, some saying it would be just about 100 miles, others suggesting over 160 miles. Preparing for the worst I decided we would do this in three runs of approximately 50 miles each just in case. Still not following a traditional Iditarod trail nobody seemed to know what facilities there may be along the way although there were rumours that there may be a bible camp at around the 60 mile mark but again nobody really knew for sure and even if it existed there was no reason to believe anyone would be there in the middle of winter.
Although it was cold the weather was calm and so for my first camping stop, about 50 miles from Tanana, I found a semi-sheltered position on a low bank just off the river and settled in for a few hours. Although early evening, light was still good and as I curled up in the straw hugging a couple of dogs close for mutual warmth, not that the dogs needed or benefited from it, the early evening light and the regular traffic of dog teams passing kept me awake. After just under five hours we hit the trail again; we were now well over 60 hours into the race and I had about one hour of sleep in the bank.
Looking back now, and even at the time, my memories of that night run are bizarre; at one point I was passed, and then running close behind Lev Shvarts but it was like we were running in a dream or virtual reality; we seemed to be going backwards and forwards and in every other direction, I kept feeling that I had lost the trail, then we would find it again, at times it felt like I was running up a steep hill but I knew that really we were running on the river: it just didn’t seem like we were running in a sled dog race – it is very hard to put the feeling into words. Around midnight we passed three or four teams camping next to the trail, it was still bitterly cold and those mushers looked tired and miserable. Then, literally around the next bend, was a huge and very well-lit building up on the bank with a few dog teams parked out front – obviously the bible camp did exist and obviously people had opened it up for the mushers. I chatted later in the race to one of the mushers who had stopped there and he commented on how great the hospitality was; whilst missing this opportunity for a warm place to stop irked me somewhat I felt especially bad for those mushers who had stopped one bend early and spent a cold night on the river when warmth and good food was less than a hundred yards away.
One thing was for certain, as the night wore on mentally I was crashing big style and starting to lose any sense of reality. In the hours just before dawn I spotted a snow machine track just off the main trail and pulled the team across for our second planned camp. I went through the routine, got the dogs fed and sleeping, climbed back into my parka, which I always discard when doing dog chores, and resting my head on my handlebar tried to get some sleep.
I awoke with a start: I was cold, very cold, dangerously cold perhaps. I jumped up and looked around into the early morning gloom. I seemed to be in the middle of a very flat, icy plane – I had absolutely no idea where I was. Worst than that however was the fact that I had absolutely no idea who I was or why I might be where I was. Panic was starting to creep through me. I seemed to be on a very wide river, it looked like to my right was some form of a bluff. I could see smoke rising in the distance, possibly from a cottage – maybe I could make it there and find out where I was. There seemed to be a bunch of straw in front of me and dogs were lying in the straw; I could not work out why I would be in this alien place with these dogs. I walked up and down trying to regain warmth and then a thought came to me that I was supposed to be trying to get somewhere, I was in a race, I was in a sled dog race. And then all of a sudden it came back to me: who I was, where I was, what I was doing. I looked towards the cottage down river and realised that the smoke I had seen was in fact the steam rising off a cooker as another camping musher was preparing breakfast for their team. It was Thursday morning, we were on the Yukon River and we were taking part in the Iditarod. I had never had amnesia before, nor since; having no idea who I was, where I was, what I was or why I was, was powerfully disconcerting, even frightening. One thing was for certain, I needed to get to Ruby and I needed to get to sleep; I don’t need to be exhausted in order to live in an alternative reality or to make dumb moves but boy does it help!!
Not only was the 2015 Iditarod going to be a new experience for me, being as it was our rookie year, it was going to be a new experience for pretty much all the field. Bad conditions through the Alaska Range in 2014 and very low snow conditions in 2015 saw Iditarod Trail Committee (ITC) make the sensible decision to shift the official race start from Willow, north to Fairbanks where the temperatures are normally much colder and snow depths traditionally more significant than in the south of the State. This would of course necessitate a new route with new checkpoints: instead of running through the traditional checkpoints such as Rainy Pass, Rohn, McGrath, Takotna etc., the race would begin in Fairbanks, run to Nenana (coincidentally the location for the start of the 1925 serum run relay), overland to Manley Hot Springs on to Tanana before taking what was thought to be a 120 leg, mostly on the Yukon River, to Ruby, where it would rejoin the traditional Iditarod northern before taking a historic mile-adding detour via Huslia, the one-time home of mushing legend George Attla and then back down to the Yukon River.
I described previously how we came into the 2015 Iditarod off a particularly grueling, and red lantern winning, Yukon Quest and as a consequence I had my first decent night’s sleep only two nights before the Iditarod Ceremonial Start. A very, very long and slow drive from Anchorage to Fairbanks after the Ceremonial Start ensured I had no sleep on the Saturday night and so came into the Monday restart in less than perfect mental condition – not the best way to begin a 1000 mile race let alone our first Iditarod. After a too warm Ceremonial Start the mercury in Fairbanks was heading down into the -40’s Celsius on start morning – cold like this just adds to the mental impairments caused by lack of sleep. Nonetheless we hit the trail as the first team out of the chute and made our way towards Nome. The run to Nenana was cold yet uneventful but with almost 80 teams in the field, and 60 miles from start to checkpoint, most teams decided to stop in Nenana for a few hours at least so the dog lot was compact and dog teams close together and the checkpoint building full. Running on adrenaline, with so many people to talk to, so many distractions, I made no effort whatsoever to sleep so as we slipped out into the night, and on the way to Manley Hot Springs, I was already descending into the realms of exhaustion.
Nenana to Manley was reported to be around 90 miles although nobody seemed that confident on any of the distances on this new route, which wasn’t great for planning strategies. Having run the Quest so many times now I have a pretty good feel for the trail, know the best places to camp on the trail, have a pretty good idea of how far we are from checkpoints at any time. On the 2015 Iditarod it was all guess work for myself and the majority of the field. About 40 miles from Nenana, and seeing that a lot of other teams were selecting that area to camp, I found a spot just off the trail and began my camping routine. The temperatures were still down in the low -30s or high -40s so even once I had bedded down, put jackets on and fed the dogs, sleep still evaded me. We pulled into Manley Hot Springs mid-morning on Tuesday, now into our second day of racing, starting to feel pretty tired and feeling the associated emotional mood swings starting to begin. The checkpoint building was quite a walk from the dog yard, nonetheless once I had the dogs sorted, I wandered into the community, found the checkpoint and grabbed a bite to eat; all conversations were focusing on rumours that something was going on with Brent and an alarm clock earlier in the day. I was too tired to worry about this and with sleeping bag in hand I wandered across the road to the school where it was reported the musher sleeping area could be. As with many checkpoints the sleeping area was in fact any spare place you could find on the floor – if you were lucky there may be a gym mat to sleep on, if not, it was the hard floor. No matter how hard I tried, sleep was impossible: mushers were coming and going all the time, official wake up calls being given, it was now midday so light was streaming into the gym, even ‘whispered’ conversations echoed around the cavernous complex. For about 30 minutes I tried to sleep; not helped by occasional leg cramps that always plague me on races, eventually I gave up and decided that I would make use of the school showers to at least try to clean up a bit (probably the first and last time I have had a shower whilst on the trail). When we hit the trail that afternoon for the sixty mile run to Tanana which I was planning on doing in one run, we had now been racing for over 36 hours and I had yet to have any sleep.
We arrived in Tanana early the following morning, the run overnight had been a struggle in trying to stay awake and I was drifting in and out of reality as we came into the checkpoint. All conversations were now on the fact that Brent had apparently been withdrawn for having an iPhone in his possession – at the time the Iditarod still maintained a rule that mushers were not to be in possession of two-way communications devices. Although Brent was using the iPhone for trail music someone had apparently seen him with it in Manley when he had used it as an alarm clock and reported this to race officials. I chatted to Brent just before he left Tanana to run his team home, such a dispiriting way for his race to finish, especially as it was rumoured that snow banks between Manley and Ruby would be full of phones as other mushers sought to avoid the same fate.
Still early in the race Tanana was no less busy than previous checkpoints but the checkpoint was small and the race official, Karen Ramstead had done a great job in sectioning off a sleeping area for mushers and was doing her best to keep that area as quiet as possible; I would guess I managed to sleep for about one hour before the desire for more food tugged me from my sleeping bag – a small victory!
We were told that Tanana to Ruby was going to be about 120 miles but in talking to other mushers estimates were wildly different, some saying it would be just about 100 miles, others suggesting over 160 miles. Preparing for the worst I decided we would do this in three runs of approximately 50 miles each just in case. Still not following a traditional Iditarod trail nobody seemed to know what facilities there may be along the way although there were rumours that there may be a bible camp at around the 60 mile mark but again nobody really knew for sure and even if it existed there was no reason to believe anyone would be there in the middle of winter.
Although it was cold the weather was calm and so for my first camping stop, about 50 miles from Tanana, I found a semi-sheltered position on a low bank just off the river and settled in for a few hours. Although early evening, light was still good and as I curled up in the straw hugging a couple of dogs close for mutual warmth, not that the dogs needed or benefited from it, the early evening light and the regular traffic of dog teams passing kept me awake. After just under five hours we hit the trail again; we were now well over 60 hours into the race and I had about one hour of sleep in the bank.
Looking back now, and even at the time, my memories of that night run are bizarre; at one point I was passed, and then running close behind Lev Shvarts but it was like we were running in a dream or virtual reality; we seemed to be going backwards and forwards and in every other direction, I kept feeling that I had lost the trail, then we would find it again, at times it felt like I was running up a steep hill but I knew that really we were running on the river: it just didn’t seem like we were running in a sled dog race – it is very hard to put the feeling into words. Around midnight we passed three or four teams camping next to the trail, it was still bitterly cold and those mushers looked tired and miserable. Then, literally around the next bend, was a huge and very well-lit building up on the bank with a few dog teams parked out front – obviously the bible camp did exist and obviously people had opened it up for the mushers. I chatted later in the race to one of the mushers who had stopped there and he commented on how great the hospitality was; whilst missing this opportunity for a warm place to stop irked me somewhat I felt especially bad for those mushers who had stopped one bend early and spent a cold night on the river when warmth and good food was less than a hundred yards away.
One thing was for certain, as the night wore on mentally I was crashing big style and starting to lose any sense of reality. In the hours just before dawn I spotted a snow machine track just off the main trail and pulled the team across for our second planned camp. I went through the routine, got the dogs fed and sleeping, climbed back into my parka, which I always discard when doing dog chores, and resting my head on my handlebar tried to get some sleep.
I awoke with a start: I was cold, very cold, dangerously cold perhaps. I jumped up and looked around into the early morning gloom. I seemed to be in the middle of a very flat, icy plane – I had absolutely no idea where I was. Worst than that however was the fact that I had absolutely no idea who I was or why I might be where I was. Panic was starting to creep through me. I seemed to be on a very wide river, it looked like to my right was some form of a bluff. I could see smoke rising in the distance, possibly from a cottage – maybe I could make it there and find out where I was. There seemed to be a bunch of straw in front of me and dogs were lying in the straw; I could not work out why I would be in this alien place with these dogs. I walked up and down trying to regain warmth and then a thought came to me that I was supposed to be trying to get somewhere, I was in a race, I was in a sled dog race. And then all of a sudden it came back to me: who I was, where I was, what I was doing. I looked towards the cottage down river and realised that the smoke I had seen was in fact the steam rising off a cooker as another camping musher was preparing breakfast for their team. It was Thursday morning, we were on the Yukon River and we were taking part in the Iditarod. I had never had amnesia before, nor since; having no idea who I was, where I was, what I was or why I was, was powerfully disconcerting, even frightening. One thing was for certain, I needed to get to Ruby and I needed to get to sleep; I don’t need to be exhausted in order to live in an alternative reality or to make dumb moves but boy does it help!!
