Doug Swingley runs down the 1995 Iditarod finish chute in Nome on his way to winning the race in a record time of 9 days, 2 hours and 42 minutes. The record has stood for five years. (ANNE RAUP / Anchorage Daily News)

Racing for a record gets harder

Mushers cut back on sleep, try to improve efficiency at checkpoints

By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News reporter

The Iditarod predictions of number-crunching scientist Cal Lensink are starting to sound almost prophetic these days.

After Doug Swingley of Montana won the 1995 race in the record time of 9 days, 2 hours and 42 minutes, Lensink put together a computer model to plot 25 years of Iditarod times and project how fast racers might be expected to go in the future.

Lensink, a biologist retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has never run a dog race, but he is an Iditarod fan motivated by scientific curiousity. That curiousity led him to an interesting picture of Alaska’s canine ultramarathon.

Winning Iditarod times follow a classic pattern of diminishing returns. Big early improvements become incrementally smaller as the room for improvement narrows.

That could explain why Swingley’s ’95 record has now stood for five years.

‘‘They’ve really come pretty close to the margin,’’ Lensink said. ‘‘There might be a little bit of improvement, a few hours or something, but I think we are going to have a lot of races that are won in more time than the existing record.’’

Taken one way, this could be a sign that the Iditarod competition isn’t as tough as it used to be.

Taken another way, it could simply be a sign the race has matured.

Swingley, who once raised the possibility of an eight-day Iditarod, doesn’t talk about that much anymore. Neither does anyone else. They all realize how hard it is just to run nine-day Iditarods.

It wasn’t always this way.

At the start of the 1990s, when the Iditarod was still an 11-day affair, Martin Buser was telling anyone who would listen that he thought a 10-day Iditarod was within reach. A lot of people figured he’d spent too much time staring at the tail ends of huskies.

No team of dogs, they thought, could run 1,100 miles from Anchorage to Nome that fast.

After all, Susan Butcher, running an almost flawless race under near-perfect conditions in 1987, needed 11 days, 2 hours and 5 minutes. Over the next three races, the woman many mushers at the time considered nearly unbeatable, managed to cut just 12 minutes off that record.

Yet Buser, the believer, went out and ran the race in 10 days, 19 hours and 17 minutes in 1992. Butcher was 10 hours back in second, still running one of those 11-day races.

By 1996, 11 days wouldn’t even get a musher in the top 20.

Buser said he saw this coming in 1988. He finished third in the Iditarod that year. It was his second top-10 finish, but it took him a little more than 12 days.

Butcher and then four-time champ Rick Swenson, the winningest mushers in Iditarod history, were still in front of him, but Buser had been watching them closely and analyzing.

He believed he had come up with a faster dog team but was losing significant time in checkpoints. Buser was losing because of checkpoint inefficiency. He set out to change that.

The result?

Buser took the Iditarod into a new realm of speed.

This has been the history of the Iditarod since the first teams plodded north in 1973 with skeptics warning they would never make it to Nome. The top finishers that year reached Nome in about 20 days. That record stood two years.

Then Emmitt Peters, an Athabaskan from Ruby on the Yukon River, blew it away. He finished the third Iditarod more than five days faster.

Peters, who would never win again but hopes to be back for another try this year, didn’t think much of it at the time. The Iditarod for the first time had good trail, he said, and he just tried to run the pace with which his team had become comfortable in training on the trapline trails in Ruby.

Others had a different view.

‘‘That’s still probably the greatest (Iditarod) achievement,’’ said Swenson, who won his first race two years later and went on to claim four more.

Musher Rod Perry, who spent years of futile effort trying to win just one race in the 1970s, considers Peters’ victory the Iditarod’s first ‘‘paradigm shift,’’ a fundamental change in the way people thought about the race.

Dick Wilmarth proved in 1973 that the 1,100 miles could be covered. Two years later, Peters proved it could be raced.

Peters had a strong team in 1975, but the biggest difference between his victory and Wilmarth’s was good trail. Over time, good trail would become the norm.

Improving trail, in turn, dictated the behavior of the mushers and the breeding and training of dogs, all of which combined to make the race faster.

Until 1980, mushers spent considerable time camping – wasting hours that could have gone to dog care or racing.

Even for the best woodsmen, fire-building is a time-consuming task – so mushers started experimenting with dog-food cookers. They first used white-gas stoves but later switched to easy-to-light, no-maintenance charcoal and finally alcohol.

White-gas cookers were in widespread use when Swenson shifted the paradigm again in 1981 – racing to Nome in 12 days, 8 hours and 45 minutes. This was another off-the-curve performance, due mainly to checkpoint efficiency, better trail, better training and the steadily evolving sled dog.

Increasingly, the big, strong dogs mushers thought necessary to break trail across the wilderness were giving way to leaner, more aerobically efficient canines capable of running faster and farther on a snowmobile-packed trail from Anchorage to Nome.

Like Peters, Swenson set a record that stood for five years.

Then, in 1986, Butcher shifted the paradigm a third time with a change in race strategy.

Butcher began to run the race as a checkpoint-to-checkpoint dash. Her husband, Dave Monson, a former Iditarod top-10 musher, met her at checkpoints, briefed her on how other teams looked and guided her to waiting accommodations. With that sort of planning, both she and the dogs rested longer and better.

Butcher reached Nome in 11 days, 15 hours, 6 minutes – slicing a whopping 17 hours off the Swenson record that had stood since 1981.

Over the next five years, with dog teams trained and prepared, with checkpoint operations ever more efficient and with the weight of equipment cut to the minimum, she went on to win three more races.

Along the way, she set two more records and whittled another 13 hours off the time. Butcher’s string of victories stands as one of the most impressive in Iditarod history.

It would fall to Buser to shift the paradigm once again.

That came in 1992 with the breaking of the 11-day barrier. Buser credits better trail and faster dogs, but Swenson – the only musher to win in three different decades – contends a significant part of the time savings came from fallout from Butcher’s victory in 1986.

After she won that year, mushers upset about the assistance provided by Monson forced a variety of rule changes aimed at minimizing the edge to be gained in villages. The result was what the Iditarod called ‘‘corralling.’’

Mushers were prohibited from staying with villagers. Everyone had to rest and camp in a ‘‘holding area’’ at each checkpoint.

That change leveled the playing field for Buser, paving the way for his first victory in 1992. Swenson said corralling led to faster speeds for everyone by giving mushers quicker access to dog food and race veterinarians and by giving dogs better resting conditions.

Led by Jeff King in 1993, five mushers took advantage of corralling to go under 11 days. Five more slipped under the bar in 1994, including Swenson, who that year ran his first sub-11-day race.

Only 31 seconds off the 11-day mark was Doug Swingley of Simms, Mont. The sixth-place showing by the businessman from Big Sky Country was the best ever by an Outsider.

Two years later, Swingley pushed the race to its next barrier. His 1995 victory dropped the winning time to 9 days, 2 hours and 42 minutes.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to compare this time to earlier races because of a rule change. In 1995, the Saturday start in Anchorage ceased to be part of the ‘‘official’’ race. The ride through Anchorage to Eagle River became purely ceremonial. No times are kept, and the race clock doesn’t start until the race restart in Wasilla.

The change cut more than a day off the race – the 24-hour difference between the Saturday start and the Sunday start, plus the 60 to 90 minutes mushers spent getting to Eagle River.

The latter, however, can probably be considered irrelevant, given that Swingley took about 35 hours off Buser’s 1993 record.

He ran to Nome at least nine or 10 hours faster than anyone before – another dramatic improvement.

Swingley succeeded with a mix of what had worked before: Fast dogs, greater checkpoint efficiency and refinements in equipment and strategies for dog rest.

Swingley’s victory left mushers wondering not how much faster the dogs could go (most racers think the dogs can go faster) but how much more the mushers can take. Some of Swingley’s time savings came by eliminating his own rest.

And that may be the real limit to Iditarod performance. How little can mushers sleep before sleep deprivation leads to lapses in judgment that create their own time-consuming errors?

Nobody knows.

But consider this: If mushers get a fast trail this year, all anyone has to do is shave nine minutes off the time spent in each of the 20 checkpoints between Wasilla and Nome to take three hours off Swingley’s record time of 9 days, 2 hours, 42 minutes.

That would put the winner under the nine-day barrier, into the magical realm of an eight-day Iditarod.

Craig Medred is the Daily News outdoors editor, who has covered more than a dozen Iditarods. He can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.

Diana Moroney's team storms around the corner of Fourth Avenue and Cordova Street at the start of the 1995 Iditarod. (BOB HALLINEN / Anchorage Daily News)