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NOME - Joe Redington really is the guiding light of the Iditarod Trail. If there was any doubt. Early in the 28th annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, Mitch Seavey of Seward had problems. A virus was sapping his team. He had to drop several of his speediest and most powerful leaders and trust the team to two 7-year-olds, Dolphin and JoeJoe. JoeJoe, of course, was named after the father of the Iditarod. "Those are some sturdy dogs," said Seavey, whose ninth-place time of 9 days, 19 hours, 15 minutes earned him a $23,500 paycheck. "They're not as fast as a guy needs to go these days. Well, Dolphin is." JoeJoe? Just reliable. The race keeps getting faster and faster - Doug Swingley of Lincoln, Mont., set a record of 9 days, 58 minutes this year - and Seavey thinks musher strategy and tactics clip time off the pace. "You can't let anything slow you down," he said. "You just don't stop. You go the same speed for 70 or 80 miles. You're trimming everything to the limit. Part of that's discovering what these athletes can really do." Seavey said there are always pockets of high winds and blowing snow that catch mushers, circumstances that in the old days would have parked them. But since 1991 when Rick Swenson and Martin Buser pushed ahead through a storm to finish 1-2, the motto is to mush on. "I don't know what it will take to stop us," Seavey said. Meanwhile, next year the Seavey clan should establish an Iditarod first with three generations of mushers competing in the same race. Mitch's son Dan, who is a Junior Iditarod veteran, plans to do the race for the first time at age 18. And Mitch's father, also named Dan, who placed third in the first Iditarod in 1973, plans to return to the race for the fourth time at age 63. "If I can totter up to the start," said Dan the elder. * Sports editor Lew Freedman can be reached at lfreedman@adn.com
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