For most of his four tries at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the story has been much the same. Neff would turn his team loose early to run with the big dogs, and then they'd falter.

Only once in four races did he manage to even crack the Iditarod top 20.

But things are looking a wee bit different this year.

Neff took off fast in the 1,000-mile Quest a couple weeks ago -- and stayed fast. Except for a two-hour penalty assessed for letting his dog team run a few miles down a road instead of immediately steering them back onto the trail, he would have won the race in record time.

Instead, he finished second by four minutes to Sebastian Schnuelle from Whitehorse, Yukon. They were both well under the record for the Quest, and even Fairbanks area mushers and race fans with no love for Neff remarked that his team looked strong and happy at the finish line.

The 41-year-old Neff, who in 1995 moved to Alaska from Evanston, Ill., to run dogs, was clearly testing the depths of that strength and happiness on Tuesday as he led the Iditarod out of the Interior village of Nikolai.

"It's stupid," said four-time Iditarod champ Jeff King from Denali Park.

King, however, was trying to keep his team close to the pace being set by Neff, who just happened to have with him a buddy from the Quest -- Schnuelle.

Schnuelle led the race into Nikolai with Neff only a minute back. Neff led the race out of Nikolai with Schnuelle only about six minutes back, about the time it takes to fill a couple extra water bottles while getting the sled packed.

A wild-haired German trained by Mercedes-Benz to work on high-performance automobiles, Schnuelle is a thoughtful guy known for holding his team to a conservative pace.

The 2009 Iditarod is by no means on a record pace, but it is moving rapidly for a competition being contested on a soft, slow trail. King pulled into Nikolai about three hours behind the two leaders and observed it was among his earliest arrivals there.

Just ahead of him was two-time and defending champ Lance Mackey from Fairbanks, who was also of the opinion that the mushers from the Klondike gold country were going just a little too fast.

"I am a little surprised at the pace some of them are taking,'' chimed in 2004 winner Mitch Seavey from Sterling. "I think they are ahead of schedule. They're not stopping.''

Mushers favoring a somewhat slower pace pointed to a trail composed of soft snow and the warm weather. Temperatures in the Farewell Burn between Rohn and Nikolai were up above freezing Tuesday, and though they dropped some as the mushers moved near the village on the banks of the South Fork Kuskokwim River, it was still warm for dogs used to zero or sub-zero temperatures.

All of the lead mushers know the dangers of going too fast this early. A dog team asked to do too much will fatigue, and once that happens it can take days, sometimes weeks, to get them back up to speed. The trick here, as the mushers approach the one 24-hour rest required of all teams somewhere along the trail, is to take that break with a team that is tired from doing all it could, but not fatigued from doing more than it should have.

The former team will come out of that 24 hours strong and raring to go. The latter will not. The difference between the two is the fine line the front runners are trying to walk.

Behind Neff, Schnuelle, King and Mackey in the lead bunch Tuesday were some of the usual suspects:

Two-time runner up Paul Gebhardt from Kasilof, who broke his sled when he hit a stump crossing the Burn but was making repairs in Nikolai; former runner-up Ed Iten from Kotzebue; Bjornar Anderson from Team Norway for which Robert Sorlie twice notched Iditarod victories; regular top-10 contender and Mackey neighbor Ken Anderson from Fairbanks; and Canadian Hans Gatt, a three-time Quest winner who finally had an Iditarod breakthrough with a sixth-place finish last year. It was the first time in nine tries that he managed to crack the top 10.

Hanging with this group was one minor surprise: Aaron Burmeister from Nenana. A 31-year-old musher who has been running Iditarod since he was 19, Burmeister left Nikolai with Neff and Schnuelle. He was in new territory. He's never run up front like this before.

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Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.