Anchorage Daily News

A victory in the Iditarod with dogs that had won another 1,000-mile race 20 days earlier. A comeback from cancer. Living on a beach with a new wife and two stepdaughters. Dogs anxious to run after racing the distance from Maine to Colorado. The No. 13 bib that his brother and father wore when they won the Iditarod on their sixth tries, the same number he wore when he won on his sixth try.

Sometimes, it's just a little too much, this Lance Mackey story.

"It's an amazing story to me, and it's my story," the 37-year-old musher said at his home north of Fairbanks. "It blows my mind to think that five or six years ago I was living in a tent, starving to death."

Lance was born June 2, 1970, in Anchorage to Cathy and Dick Mackey -- the same Dick Mackey who helped organize and race in the first Iditarod. It's the same Dick Mackey frozen in time in that famous 1978 black-and-white photo with the whip in his hand, nostrils flaring like a racehorse, crazy eyes bulging as he sprints with Rick Swenson down the chute at Nome.

Dick and Cathy divorce, Lance grows into his 20s, marries, has a daughter, divorces. He drifts away from dogs and into commercial fishing, with no fishery too dangerous. Lance can earn money in the Bering Sea. But there are other elements of life he's not so good at.

There was the child support that went unpaid for a while. Delinquent IRS payments. An arrest for theft. Another for forgery. The third son of the famous Alaska dog musher seemed to be heading down the wrong trail.

"He certainly wasn't leading the lifestyle you'd go out and brag on," 74-year old Dick Mackey said from his home in Salmon, Idaho. "But you don't give up on your kids. You had hopes that one day he'd get his head screwed on straight. And he did."

COMEBACK BEGINS

Lance Mackey's dog yard is called Mackey's Comeback Kennel. He didn't name it for his 1997 marriage, but that might be when his turnaround began.

Lance and Tonya had known each other since the 1970s, when they both attended Big Lake Elementary School. In the late 1990s, each was living in Nenana and riding out a bad relationship when Tonya drove Lance to Fairbanks as a favor.

"On the ride from Nenana to here, we figured we should have been together," Tonya Mackey said.

They married, and as a birthday present to himself in 1997, Lance took Tonya and his new stepdaughters, Amanda and Brittney, for a ride out of Nenana, hoping never to return.

"We didn't know where we were going, other than to the Kenai Peninsula," he said. "We had gas money to get down there, that was about it."

With two junker pickups loaded with all their possessions, they were an entertaining sight for tourists on the Sterling Highway.

"We looked like the Clampetts," Mackey said. "We had the mattress strapped on top of the truck, stuff hanging out the tailgate. And we had a fish tank in the back of the trailer, with fish still in it, sloshin' on down the road."

The fish didn't make it, but the Mackeys did. They found themselves a place to camp on a Cook Inlet beach. Lance wasn't sure whose land it was.

No one complained, so the Mackeys didn't budge. They became regulars at the local food bank, and the girls walked the beach to find flounder they cooked over driftwood fires.

Lance got a job at a construction company and saved enough to buy a 2-acre plot of land, where he and Tonya cut trees with a hand saw and built a small cabin. They insulated the floor with clothes from the Salvation Army.

"It was a shack, man," Lance said. "But as miserable as it was, it was a blast. This was the start of our life. And every day, it got better and better.

Tonya got a job in town. And then the dogs appeared -- 10 castoffs from Kenai Peninsula mushers. They gave Lance that old feeling again.

Just when things were getting normal, one of Lance's friends moved away, leaving behind the perfect property for a musher, with a dog yard and a nice house.

Lance decided the only way he could afford the $3,000 down payment was to head back to the Bering Sea. He was gone for three months, long-lining for cod and halibut. His wife was home in the dead of winter, with two girls, 10 dogs and no electricity.

"Everything that would run most folks away, I put her right in the middle of," Lance said. "It was the same things that made me lose my first wife, and now I was doing it again."

Lance spent a dreadful three months chewing on the implications of his decision, but Tonya kept things together on her end.

"That was probably the toughest time, but I knew he wasn't having the time of his life, either," Tonya said.

"That was good enough for me as far as, 'Is this the right woman?' " Lance said. "I didn't have a doubt in my mind."

When Lance came back from fishing with the down payment for the new property, he told Tonya what tugged at his soul: he wanted to run dogs. She told him she was in, 100 percent. They agreed on a plan.

"In five years, if we're not at least competitive, we'll try something different," he told his wife. "I'm not going to spend my whole life being a middle-of the- pack kind of guy."

INTERRUPTED BY CANCER

Lance ran his first Iditarod in 2001. He took his time, learned the trail, and finished 36th out of 57 mushers.

He also finished in misery from, what he was told before the race, was an abscessed tooth in his right jaw. After toughing out blinding headaches on the trail and noticing he couldn't turn his head to the right without excruciating pain, he did an uncharacteristic thing -- he asked Tonya to schedule a doctor's appointment.

The growth on the right side of his neck was the size of a softball when a doctor operated on his squamous cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer.

Radiation treatments followed the surgery and destroyed his sense of taste. The doctor removed his salivary glands, which is why he now almost always has a water bottle in hand.

His disease had other lasting consequences: He can't lift his right arm over his head because of nerve damage. That same nerve damage made his left index finger hurt so much that he begged a Kenai doctor to remove it. The doctor finally gave in, and Lance found he was happier without the digit.

Muscled and lean, with a ponytail, goatee and slate blue eyes, Lance is more handsome in person than he appears in trail photos. On the right side of his neck is a smooth patch of scar tissue. A cut there might bleed for a long time, he said.

"I've been told that if a dog scratched me (on my neck) while I was standing in an emergency room full of doctors, they might not be able to save me."

Lance spent two months in an Anchorage hospital after his surgery, and then spent weekdays in the hospital for another couple of months. During that summer of 2001, he suffered his lowest lows.

"(Cancer) shot my drive right down the toilet," he said. When he went home on weekends, he would gravitate toward his dogs.

"He'd take his pickup, park by the dog yard, and just sit there, hour after hour," Dick Mackey said. "Looking back, I don't know if emotionally or physically he could have survived without the dogs."

Lance was always a good dog man, even as a boy, Dick Mackey said. His son had that rare ability to become part of the canine team.

Regaining his strength in the fall of 2001, Lance spent more and more time in the dog yard. Amanda and Brittney, whom he had recently adopted, would hook the dogs to the four-wheeler as he went on his first training runs. At the start of the 2002 Iditarod, he was back on the starting line, a feeding tube protruding from his stomach.

He scratched from that race, but he was a different musher -- one who learned quickly and took nothing for granted.

From there, nothing mattered but improving.

In 2006, Lance finished first in the Yukon Quest for the second-straight year and 10th in the Iditarod. He also won that year's Kobuk 440 and the Copper Basin 300. The five-year plan was looking good, but Lance wanted more. Like his older brother Rick (in 1983) and his father (1978), he wanted to win the Iditarod.

LUCKY 13

Lance wanted to be the first musher to sign up for all the races he entered in 2007. To accomplish that in the Iditarod, he needed to camp out at race headquarters in Wasilla for seven days, which made him the first musher at the door on the day registration opened in June of 2006.

That earned him the right to pick his number. He chose 13.

"I wanted the bib for my own satisfaction of wearing number 13 on my sixth attempt, just like my brother and father when they won," he said. "Whether it had the same luck remained to be seen. But I wanted it just because ... how cool would that be?"

He got his number and focused on the upcoming season. He and his family, now including his stepson, Cain Carter, moved to a subdivision without electricity north of Fairbanks because the snow was more reliable than on the Kenai Peninsula.

Next door was Ken Anderson, who Mackey would battle to the finish line of this year's Yukon Quest before winning by 15 minutes.

Anderson focused on the Iditarod, Lance on the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod. Though the Iditarod is where the money is, the rugged nature of the Yukon Quest suits his dogs, Lance said. Plus, he loves the country between Whitehorse and Fairbanks.

Fewer than 20 people have attempted both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod in a single year. The 1,000-mile Quest ended less than two weeks before the Iditarod started. Mushers who have finished both races typically had two teams -- a group of shaggy-haired grinders for the bitter cold of the Quest's Yukon River in February and a team of nimble swifts for the faster Iditarod that often is warmer.

Lance was set to run his B-team in the Yukon Quest when the organizers found more money for the purse. They announced the winner would get $40,000, and mushers took notice.

"I'd never made $40,000 in a race," Lance said. "That's a pretty attractive number. So, at the last minute, I decided to take my main dogs to the Quest."

A DREAM TEAM

On Feb. 11, 2007, one day and 190 miles into the Yukon Quest, Lance stood on the runners behind his team as silhouettes of spruce trees slipped past in the darkness. Out there in the 80-mile gap between checkpoints, he realized his 14 dogs were like 50- pound perpetual-motion machines.

"Every time I'd stop, they'd just start screaming (to keep going), and they were eating everything," he said. "The way they looked I figured, 'I'll take them into Carmacks, give them a good long rest.

"I got to Carmacks, they stood there screaming and barking like we were leaving the starting line."

He shook out straw for his 14 dogs and they eventually curled up for nearly eight hours.

From there, he took long run after long run, leaving his competitors far behind and gaining a big lead halfway into the race, at Dawson City, Yukon.

"The farther we went, the better they got," he said. "It was like adding coal to a freight train. I just kept shoveling the food into them and they got stronger and faster and better as we went.

"It was an amazing thing to witness," he said. "And they continued it all the way to Nome."

He won the Yukon Quest in record time despite temperatures that never rose above minus-20 during the second half of the race.

With only 11 days to recover before the Iditarod start, he returned home to find that some of the dogs he wanted to take to the Iditarod weren't ready. Some were injured, some were heavy, some had bred while he was away.

Instead of mixing fresh dogs into his Iditarod team, Lance harnessed up 13 of his Yukon Quest dogs on Fourth Avenue in Anchorage for the start of the Iditarod. He took only three dogs that hadn't run the Yukon Quest.

"It didn't work out the way it was supposed to," Lance said. "In a way, it was a blessing in disguise."

Led by Larry, the 6-year-old leader, the first dog to cross the Yukon Quest finish line, Lance's team turned out to be perfect for the Iditarod.

With poor snow from McGrath to the Yukon River, it was a race for hardheaded mile-eaters. Lance kept with the leaders early and took the lead for good going through Shaktooli, on the Bering Sea coast.

Lance realized he had a special Iditarod run going during the trip from Kaltag to Unalakleet, a 90-mile stretch where he passed both Paul Gebhardt and Martin Buser, and gained an hour on race leader Jeff King.

Lance's head was swimming with his good fortune and sleep deprivation when he reached Unalakleet.

"I did my chores, I fed them and went in to get a nap," he said. While he slept, veterinarians kept glancing over at his 13 dogs.

"When I woke up, the vets told me that my dogs did not lay down for the first 50 minutes that I was in Unalakleet."

The magic continued. In the Blueberry Hills on the way to Shaktoolik, he saw his former neighbor and the last musher he would see on the trail, Paul Gebhardt.

"Fifteen miles out of the checkpoint, I went by him like he was tied to a tree," Lance said. "I had to laugh out loud and tell my boys, 'We got something special here.' "

He continued talking to the only creatures who could hear him: "I'm going to drive you guys in a new truck. The next time we go to a race, we're not going to have to worry if we're going to get there."

His leader seemed pleased with that news.

"And I swear Larry looked me right in the eye and he kind of winked, like 'Yeah Dad!' "

Mackey's Hollywood ending continued:

• Wearing bib 13 on the 13th day of March, Mackey pockets $109,000 for his month's work;

• Larry wins the Golden Harness Award and is the most coveted dog in Alaska;

• Lance's father's plane is late for the finish but they have a tearful reunion in Nome;

• Tonya gets a sporty new Dodge to commute to her job as supervisor at a Fairbanks video store.

Before long, Lance's cell phone rings regularly with mushers who want to buy or breed his dogs. People recognize him in town, ask to shake his hand. He chats extra long with the cancer survivors, listens to their stories.

If there's a lesson in all this, it may be that the simple gift of being alive is a precious one. And, while you are above ground, anything is possible.

"I believe I'm really lucky to be here," Lance said. "It sounds corny, but I look forward to every single day."

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Freelance writer Ned Rozell of Fairbanks writes the Alaska Science column that appears on each week's Science page.

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