Built for speed and endurance
Years of breeding and training have created extraordinary canines

By Doug O'Harra
Daily News Reporter
February 23, 1997

As a thousand huskies gather at the starting chute of the 25th Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a casual glance will suggest a menagerie of breeds,from wolfish animals with piercing blue eyes to floppy-eared, multi-colored mongrels.

Look again. Beneath that double-layer of fur runs one of the world's consummate working animals. The Iditarod dog.

Years of selective breeding and specialized training have produced an extraordinary canine athlete, smaller than the classic trapline dogs ofmushing lore, yet heavier than dogs trained solely for the sprint. A rangy animal with a muscular chest and lean haunches. A dog with an oilysmooth stride that's snappy and unrelenting, on feet that can withstand coarse trails and punchy snow. A trotter that can lope when trail conditionsallow, and consume 10,000 calories a day with ravenous precision.

''A 50-pound dog with a 100-pound heart,'' said two-time Iditarod champion Martin Buser. ''Long-legged, well-angulated, long backs, nicelyproportioned -- a dog that's built for speed and endurance.''

Not massive Buck, the dog hero of ''Call of the Wild,'' but an obsessed and efficient marathoner.

''The ones that can balance a champagne glass between their shoulder blades as they're running down the trail are the ones that don't get hurt,''said defending Iditarod champion Jeff King. ''The fluidness of the gait has gone from a mud truck with hard rubber tires to a well-suspendedPorsche.

''Those are the dogs we've selected and bred.''

Bob Hallinen / Anchorage Daily News A few of the pups in Joe Redington's Knik kennel. Redington, one of the state's top dog breeders, often has more than 100 dogs in his dog lot.

Sled dogs always have evolved closely with their races, according to breeders and mushers, becoming as lean and swift as conditions allowed. Butin 1973, none had ever run a 1,100-mile race, and the first Iditarod began with more questions than answers. What sort of dog would run best? What should it eat? How should it be trained? Nobody knew for sure, so mushers ran the dogs they had. ''All dogs in those days either came from the villages or from people running the Rondy and the North American (sprint races) or both,'' saidfour-time Iditarod champ Susan Butcher, who competed in her first Iditarod in 1978.

Future champ Dick Mackey entered his sprint team in the inaugural race, as did sprint champion George Attla and several others. Anvik musherKen Chase entered his trapline dogs, as did first champion Dick Wilmarth.

With so many working dogs on the trail, some mushers remember those first Iditarod teams as heavy-boned, with more muscular bodies andthicker fur than many of today's competitive huskies.

''The average dogs the first few years of the race were probably 10 to 15 pounds heavier than they are today,'' Mackey said. ''But even sprint dogstoday are not as heavy as they were 25 years ago.''

Then the selection process began with a vengeance.

The heavy trapline dogs performed well only when trails needed breaking -- otherwise they wore out and fell behind. But some dogs that excelledon sprint tracks faltered on the day-after-day grind. At the same time, a few mediocre sprinters -- possibly dogs that instinctively paced themselves --outperformed their swifter teammates.

''My worst sprint dog ended up being my best long-distance dog because he wanted to be a trotter,'' Mackey recalled. ''It just changed everythingthat you were breeding for.''

In the race's early days, when snowy or punchy conditions prevailed, mushers were often forced to stomp out the trail in snowshoes, their dogswallowing in the wake. Veteran musher Lavon Barve said his Rondy team tried to lope in the 1975 and 1976 Iditarods, but couldn't because evengood sections of trail often collapsed underfoot, allowing teams with a lower-geared trotting speed to pass.

''I could go 50 miles in three hours in those races, but you just didn't have a trail to run on,'' he said. ''Now you can get up and roll pretty good,but there used to be poke holes all the way to Nome.''

Long-distance mushing, the dog drivers discovered, simply needed a new version of the husky, created through breeding or training or acombination. Not only did Iditarod dogs need to trot rather than lope, they required thick enough fur to sleep outside in winter.

''You wanted a dog with cast-iron feet, that ate on command, that crapped on command,'' Mackey said.

By the mid- to late-1970s, Iditarod mushers were refining kennels and training for those qualities. Sometimes that meant diluting the fast ''hound''strains bred into racing huskies. Sometimes it meant mixing accomplished sprint lines with village huskies and working dogs to revive rugged Bushtraits.

After an exhaustive survey of mushing kennels, Susan Butcher obtained sprinters from Fairbanks, working dogs from Yukon River villages and theDenali Park area, and still others from the Redington clan. Though she selected for feet, coat, speed and appetite, as did other racers, Butcher alsowanted a team that loved mushing as much as she did.

''What mattered the most to me -- and has always mattered the most -- is the dog's inner desire and personality and love of what they're doing,'' shesaid. ''I bred with attitude as the number one important item, and I still do.''

Martin Buser, who ran two races with borrowed Siberian huskies, built his own kennel in the early 1980s with dogs he bought from master sprintbreeders Gareth Wright, George Attla and Jim Welch. ''My assumption was these particular dogs could go a thousand miles if I trained them a little differently,'' Buser said. As the 1980s passed into the 1990s, the Iditarod race grew faster and faster, from 12 days, to 11, to 10. ''Basically, if you just look at the whole thing from start to finish, we are getting faster, but there's a whole bunch of reasons,'' Butcher said. ''Themost important reason is that trail conditions have improved immensely.'' But if huskies haven't changed all that much, why do Iditarod dogs often look so much beefier than their sinewy sprint cousins? It's all in the waythey've been mushed, according to top dog drivers.

Jim Lavrakas / Anchorage Daily News Dogs trained for the Iditarod are heavier, more muscular and grow thicker fur than their sprint cousins, according to Susan Butcher.

For instance, Butcher said she has long noticed that when sprint dogs are trained for the Iditarod, they grow thicker fur, muscle up and gain weight.Ramy Brooks -- grandson of Gareth Wright and son of sprint champion Roxy Wright Champaine -- said he has discovered the same thing as hetrains his mother's former Rondy champions for the Iditarod.

''It's not a different dog -- it's the way you train the dogs,'' Brooks said. ''If you talk to my grandpa or my mom, you'll see that they've always swornby that -- it's the training.''

The notion that the best Iditarod dogs have undergone a dramatic change in size or genetic makeup over the years is ''a huge misconception,''according to Butcher.

''My (first) dogs were not bigger than what I'm running today, or what anybody else is running today,'' Butcher said. ''And the gene pool hasn'tchanged much, either.''

Mackey agreed. ''A good dog in 1973 for the Iditarod is no different than today. It's just that while you had one or two of them back then, now youhave a whole team of them.''

Still, Butcher and other top mushers acknowledged that 25 years of selective breeding has probably made subtle changes in their huskies.

''In the latter part of my 17 years of racing the Iditarod, I had dogs that were in the seventh or eighth generation of breeding best Iditarod dog to bestIditarod dog,'' Butcher said. ''I think that I had inadvertently taken some physiological differences and bred them into the kennel.''

Such changes might show up in the toughness of feet, temperament and desire to run, or even the dogs' mechanical structure and its influence ongait, mushers said.

''I don't think the (top) speed has changed a lot, but the ability to maintain the speed due to efficiency of locomotion has changed,'' King said. ''Butit's not like there was something that wasn't there before.''

Buser said he wants to accelerate the pace even more. With the trail consistently hard packed, with gear becoming ultra-light, with nutrition anddog care and training strategy evolving into hard science, Buser said he aims to train and breed huskies that will sprint all the way.

''At first it was to trot to Nome,'' Buser said. ''But now I'm looking for dogs that could lope a thousand miles. And we're making progress.''

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