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No sleep, long run, take toll on mushersArriving in Unalakleet, the Iditarod's front pack of mushers spent a cool, clear Sunday morning packing themselves into the checkpoint. John Baker of Kotzebue got there first by about two and a half hours. Then, between about 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning, four mushers piled in behind him: Ramey Smyth, Hans Gatt, Sebastian Schnuelle and Hugh Neff. This group setting the pace for a final push along the coast has set itself up as a two-tiered strike team: Smyth, who is leading the four-pack that's now chasing Baker, is the guy seen as Baker's biggest threat. The other three -- Gatt, Schnuelle and Neff -- claim their final race days will be spent attempting to out-gun each other and Smyth for a still respectable, but not as glorious, finish. "There's no hope in hell that I can catch him," Gatt said of Baker while rubbing his dogs down with massage oil. "I guess the three of us are going for second place." Gatt blamed a bout with kennel cough early in the race for interfering with his ability to "really race the way I wanted to race." But nearing the final stretch, he was pleased with how his team had bounced back, and some of the dogs, he said, had actually put on weight, not an easy achievement when they are running marathons day after day after day. Sebastian Schnuelle, who pulled in about 25 minutes later, said his overland jaunt that the trip had turned out to be "kind of a funky trip." "I don't do so well with these all-nighters," he said, admitting that he fell asleep a few times, a curse a lot of the mushers were having a hard time waving off. When asked whether he might go after Baker, his answer was as adamant as Gatt's. "No. I'm not even going to try," he said. Bad weather would help increase the odds, but even then, not much, he said, since Baker's team is also good in storms. Schnuelle worked his dog line efficiently at the checkpoint, but when it came time to separate two pots which wouldn't separate, he paused and appeared to curse at the stuck cookers Many of his dogs have sore ankles and are dealing with "dings and pings," he said, but nothing that wasn't manageable. "Massaging, massaging, massaging," he said, was the remedy keeping them in the game. Like Gatt and Schnuelle, Hugh Neff said he, too, had given up on trying to catch up to Baker and would race to the finish based on whatever he thought his dogs were capable of. In the past though, Neff has said the coast is where his "speed demons" will find their groove and settle in to a quickened pace. All he would say of his strategy moving forward from Unalakleet was that it was now time to "just hang out and play." "It's early," he said. On the sidelines, spectators and mushers spent time sizing up the teams. Baker? He's the toughest competitor out there. Schnuelle? He's steady and full and endurance. Hans? He's got a wicked fast team. Neff? He's fast, too. Smyth? He and his dogs are both speedy, and he's the last guy you want coming up behind you toward the end of any race. Smyth said the run from Kaltag was long and, at the beginning, bumpy. "The moguls were huge," he said. There were other inconveniences, too. Crusty snow made it hard for the dogs to pull, as though they were trying to haul the sled over square marbles. Then there was the issue of just trying to keep his eyes open. "I had to work really hard to stay awake," he said. His remedy for averting a sleep-induced mishap on the trail? Tying himself to his sled with one of the team's neck lines. But as he looked after his team, a race veteran watching from the sidelines thought Smyth and his dogs looked really good. "He's trotting around and looks better-rested than Baker," said Mitch Seavey, who was forced to drop out of the race last week by an injury. Smyth was working quickly and efficiently and seemed alert as he did his checkpoint chores -- all signals, Seavey said, that he may indeed have an extra edge. Contact Jill Burke at jill@alaskadispatch.com. |
