The race begins! Will talks to us about the oddity of finally being on the Iditarod. The team is passed… A few times! The phone is put into a precarious position. Listen on Apple Podcasts • View Plain Text Transcript Check out the emails that Buddies received as the race was beginning! Here’s the Lineup for Iditarod 2021!!! Getting Set And they’re off! More photos from today View Transcript Onward and Other Directions Episode 2: Trail! Hi, I’m Will. I live with 28 dogs and together we travel across the winter landscape of Alaska. They run and I hang on to a rickety sled behind them. Our team is called ATAO Kennel. This is Onward and Other Directions, a podcast where I take you along our first Iditarod through recordings I made throughout the race in March of 2021. The Iditarod is one of the longest sled dog races in the world. And I’ve been working towards running it since I started mushing in the year 2000. This episode is the first recording on the race. The team and I have left the starting line and are on our way. We’re traveling along wide braided rivers towards Skwentna, the first resupply checkpoint in the race. We will actually end up stopping to camp about 10 miles before Skwentna at mile 50 of the race as part of our race plan. This recording is a few hours into the run and a few hours before we camp. [Musical transition] All right. Are we recording? I can’t tell Oh, looks like it. All right. Well, we’re a couple hours into the Iditarod. Maybe I’ll throw in some cool audio from the start. I really didn’t have the capacity to record then. Also, I have no idea how these recordings are gonna sound. They could just totally be garbage. But I gotta keep having to stop and wave at people. A lot of people were on the river still, that we’ll be on for, uh, another like, well, like a total of 80 miles basically. Er, yeah, about 80 miles, I think. And then, um, and then we’ll finally kind of head up into the mountains, but. Yup. Still on the river and there’ve been a lot of snowmachiners and families and little camps waving us on. [Loudly aside to someone else] Oh, sorry. Whoa. You moved faster than I thought. You guys ready? [Back towards the audience] That was Aaron Burmeister calling trail to pass. And, uh, I’m sure you can hear the plane noise. [To someone else] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. [To audience] People saying good luck and see you next week. Also, there’s a plane landing about, I don’t know, twenty feet away from me. The dogs don’t seem to care. It is… It’s really weird to see so many people when you’re mushing. And I’m guessing [To the dogs] Haw! Haw! [To audience] I’m guessing that they, uh — there’s a person walking down the river, and the dogs wanted to go over to her. [To the person walking] My dogs thought you were calling them. My dogs thought you were calling them. [To audience] Yeah, it’s uh weird. Yeah, unfortunately, I don’t know how COVID friendly the, uh, these gatherings are. Mostly seems like it’s kind of like individual families and they’re far apart from each other. But I definitely think this is one fear that holding the Iditarod, you know, kind of incurred. Um. Anyway, I feel kinda silly that I didn’t hear Aaron calling trail. He gave me some really good advice about nutrition, but um. Anyway. When you call trail, the other person’s supposed to stop and pull over. Which I did, as soon as I realized, um, what was going on. I thought it was somebody else yelling, cause we were kind of in so much commotion there. It’s a really hot day. It finally started to cool off a little bit, but when we left it was in the high 20s, and the sun was just beating down, and these guys have not really been running at that kind of a temperature. We did do a run, the last run we did ended up in the 20s, but, I mean, that’s just like not been our norm. So, um, I feel like they’re moving just a little bit slower. I also made the mistake of, um, uh, they had kind of a bigger meal before we took off, which I didn’t intend for them to have, and, um, they probably should have just had like a broth. So we did our first snack stop and they were like, eh, I’m good. [To someone else] Thank you. Oh! Alright! [To audience] That guy told us “It’s all about fun.” [Others in background] Good luck! [Will, replying] Thank you. [Others] Have fun! [Will, replying] Thank you. [Will, to audience] There’s a lot of kids. And when I tell them, thank you, about half of them say You’re welcome. Like, yeah, you should thank me. That’s pretty funny. Anyway, these guys are moving slow. But it’s hard because I mean, notoriously this first leg, you really want to go fast. So maybe it’s kind of a blessing in disguise that it’s a little hotter. And these guys don’t really want to move as fast. Because ideally, we’re going between eight and nine miles on this first leg, average. And that’s exactly where we are. In fact, we’re actually on the high side of that a little bit. When I check on my GPS to see our speed. We keep being kind of above nine, which is a little faster than I want to go. So I have to keep slowing them down. Everybody else. I mean, like a lot of the other mushers that we’re passing are, um, going pretty fast, so it’s uh, it’s definitely a weird comparison, like Aaron is gone already. He’s like, he flew by us. And he’s going forward. I mean, he’s probably going like, I don’t know, 11… 10 or 11 miles per hour. And because this race is so different, a lot of people might end up going faster for the whole thing. Because it’s quite a bit shorter. But um [sneezes] oh, gosh, [sneezes again] sorry. Oh, I bet that was loud. I didn’t put my gaiter on because it’s so hot this morning. So my neck is kind of cold now. Alright. Alright, come on, Belle. Go! Alright. Alright. Let’s go. Good, good girls. There you go. We’ve got Belle and Rey in lead, who are really great, steady pair, Rey is just three. And she’s kind of she really started leading mostly last year. She’s a great leader, she’s really smart. But she is still learning some things. And one of the things she still needs to keep practicing is pooping and running at the same time when she’s in the front of the team. Because it is a little bit more tricky, uh, um, so that’s what she was trying to do just there, and, um, yeah, Belle had to kind of help her keep going forward. because ideally, they poop and run at the same time. I mean, they– it’s pretty amazing. When I’ve done tours, or whatever, with sled dogs, and I feel like that’s probably the most amazing, or that’s the thing that amazes the tourists the most is that they poop and run at the same time. They’re really good at it. So. If we stopped every time they pooped, we would not go very, very far. You know, one thing that’s been, I don’t know, kind of a telltale thing on this beginning leg already is that, um, when I first started mushing dogs, I used to think that, like, okay, I’ll give ’em a break, you know, every couple miles, cause they’re gonna like that, like I would like a break if I was running, every couple miles, but then I did actually start myself running, like distance running, and I realized that, if you stop every couple miles, you like lose all of your momentum, and it just turns into a crappy run. So the best thing, ideally, is, um, is actually to, um, to keep going and try to stop as little as possible. So, right now, we’re — even though it feels like we’re kind of moving slow, and we don’t necessarily have total forward momentum, like, the dogs are a little bit, like, kind of distracted. They see another team, and they like yeah! They’re hot, definitely, really hot. Which is another reason to keep ’em slow, you know, not try to push ’em really hard in this hot weather, um, but, again, like that’s part of our strategy is to stay slow, stay in that middle range and then keep in the middle range. Like that’s our, that’s our goal. But anyway, yeah, the dogs are kind of like a little all over the place. I mean, which is totally understandable. It’s like… it’s a new experience, it’s uh. There’s a lot going on. I mean, like you heard all those machines, there’s birds, we’re on a totally different trail that all of them except for Emmy have been on, so it’s uh. Yeah, this is a whole new world, for sure. And um, so. Yeah. I guess I’m kind of distracted, too, which I’m sure is adding to that energy, because I can’t remember why I was talking about being distracted, but, um, hopefully even though we don’t — I think I was saying, even though we don’t have that forward drive necessarily, we um. I mean, they’ve got the drive. We’re going forward. Um. Oh, I was talking about making all the stops, even though, yeah, like their energy is kind of like all over the place, stopping every few miles, which I was doing, because for a couple reasons, one, because they were hot, and I really wanted them to be able to get snow and roll in the snow, cool off a little bit. But two, because you know, it’s at the beginning of a race, you ended up getting passed by a lot of teams. I’m right- I was- I started basically right in the middle. So I [had] 20 teams behind me. And yeah, I think I’ve been passed now by almost 10 of them. I don’t know if you can hear that background noise. But it’s the, uh, it is the it’s snow machines like racing up and down this river. And I just for some context, the river is probably like, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell without like perspective, but like half a football field, the football field wide, something like that. Huge, it’s really wide. These rivers in Alaska are like really, really wide, sprawling rivers. So the snow machines are also on the river, but they’re, they’re really far a
