NOME — Wade Marrs of Willow blasted toward the finish line here Tuesday morning, kicking his foot off the snow and using a ski pole to gain any extra speed he could muster. He knew Pete Kaiser and his sled dog team were close.
How close, he didn't know.
His face flushed, with icicles on his red mustache, Marrs and his dogs reached the burled arch at 11:22 a.m. Marrs, 25, collapsed on his sled, breathing deeply inside his blue snowsuit.
"Oh my goodness," he said. "We made it. I thought I was going to die."
He made it 2 minutes and 53 seconds ahead of Kaiser to seize fourth place and the $51,825 that comes with it — $4,350 more than fifth place paid.
Marrs rested for only a few seconds before he walked down the line of his dogs, all dressed in blue coats, petting each one and posing for photos with his two leaders. He gave girlfriend Sophie DeBruin a hug, picking her up off the ground.
"Baby, you worked for that," she told him.
Marrs said he knew Kaiser had a strong team and was closing. He kept looking over his shoulder, but as the sun rose it blocked his sight down the trail.
"I couldn't see him," Marrs said, "but I knew he'd be there." He described his run into Nome as "brutal," and said his legs were shaking after running much of the way up the Norton Sound coast.
"That was insane," he said. "I just feel dead now. I've never worked that hard in my life. Holy cow."
Year after year, Marrs has made big jumps in the standings, and this year was no different. In 2013 he placed 32nd. In 2014 he was 16th. In 2015 he was eighth. And this year he placed fourth.
Soon after Marrs arrived, a blaring siren signaled that another musher was coming down Front Street. Kaiser drove under the burled arch with 11 dogs who kept pulling in their harnesses and barking after he stopped — as if 1,000 miles across Alaska weren't enough.
Kaiser, a 28-year-old from Bethel, said he could see Marrs ahead, but he couldn't gain enough speed to close the gap.
Marrs walked up to Kaiser and congratulated him. "Good job, man," Marrs told him. "I told you I'd make you work for it."
For the previous eight hours or so, Kaiser said, he did a lot of kicking and poling to move faster down the coast as the Marrs-Kaiser race played out after hundreds of miles on the trail.
Marrs left White Mountain, 77 miles from the finish line, with a 31-minute lead over Kaiser.
"We both knew that I had a little faster team than him, but he had a 30-minute lead," said Kaiser, who notched his third top-10 finish. "It came right down to the wire."
Kaiser held his son, Ari, at the finish line and said his goal for this Iditarod was to make it back to the top 10 for the first time since 2012. He placed 14th last year.
"I can live with this for sure," he said.