Iditarod musher DeeDee Jonrowe preps for Boston Marathon

WASILLA — One of the longest-running mushers in Iditarod history getting ready for another big race next week — but she won’t be bringing her prized sled dogs.

On Monday, April 18, East Coast fans of 62-year-old mushing great DeeDee Jonrowe will be able to watch her running on their home turf in the 2016 Boston Marathon.

“It’s kind of one of those bucket list things,” Jonrowe said during an interview on Wednesday.

Though Jonrowe has run many marathons and half-marathons over the last 15 years or so — not to mention 11 finishes of Seward’s annual Mount Marathon Race — this is the first time she’s qualified for Boston.

“I never even thought I could, I never even thought about it,” she said.

That was until 2014, when she ran the Kenai River Marathon in 4 hours, 18 minutes, 42 seconds — about 6 minutes faster than the 4:25:00 Boston Marathon qualifying standard for female competitors age 60-64.

Jonrowe said she usually runs about two marathons a year, but wasn’t too focused on training last year after the Sockeye Fire consumed her home. It was a year of personal struggles for Jonrowe, who also lost her mother to cancer.

“Last summer was such a horrible thing, I don't think I did much but run for mental health last year,” she said.

Jonrowe and her husband Mike got a little bit of a break from things recently, having just returned from a trip to Hawaii with friends. She said she did some running on the islands, but isn’t expecting to have the race of her life in Boston next week.

“I don’t think I’ll hit that 4:18 from a couple years ago,” she said.

Still, given her star status as a musher, she feels a little bit of pressure to have a strong finish.

“People have extremely high expectations if you do well in one sport and it doesn't always travel over to other sports,” Jonrowe said.

Humble beginnings

Jonrowe well remembered her introduction to marathon running.

She said some friends talked her into running the Trent-Waldron Glacier Half Marathon in Anchorage one May, thinking it might “be a good idea to see how the dogs feel.”

She said she ran “basically the same schedule” she had been using to train her sled dogs in preparation for the race, running just ¾ of the full length (8-10 miles, in her case).

Come race day, things didn’t go quite as she expected.

“I hit the wall so hard at 10 miles,” Jonrowe said. “I just crumbled.”

She finished the race, but guessed she took half an hour to run the last 2 miles. Afterward, she noticed in herself “a lot of the same side effects” she’d seen in her dogs upon reaching Skwentna, the second checkpoint on the Iditarod Trail. So when she signed up to run the Anchorage Mayor’s Half Marathon a month later, she decided to experience the whole 13.1 miles before the race.

The new training regimen made a world of difference. She finished 25 minutes faster.

“Afterwards I felt like a million bucks, and then we flew to Fairbanks and I did a 10k that night,” Jonrowe said.

She knew she would never train her dogs the same way again.

After that race, “I made sure they saw the full mileage at least twice before the longest run they were gonna make,” she said.

But Jonrowe still had lessons to learn. When she qualified for the 2006 Ironman in Kona, Hawaii, she “trained and trained and trained,” but wasn’t prepared for the swim on race day.

“The waters were rough,” she said, and she wasn’t able to complete the first leg of the triathlon.

Not long before that, she had also broken a few ribs in training for the bicycle portion. While biking, her iPod had fallen out of her pocket, and her knee-jerk attempt to stop by jamming on the brakes sent her flying over the handle bars.

“That is my testament to why you should wear a helmet,” Jonrowe said, remembering the crack in hers from the incident.

Looking forward

Jonrowe said her main goal for the Boston Marathon is just to finish, as well as spend time with family and friends.

One of those friends is 46-year-old Willow ultrarunner David Johnston, who will be joining Jonrowe in the marathon, which he first ran in 2006.

“Dave Johnston and (wife) Andrea Hambach are my mentors,” Jonrowe said.

Jonrowe said she plans to do more long-distance races this year, including the Anchorage RunFest Marathon (previously Big Wild Life Runs, previously Humpy’s Classic Marathon) and possibly the Anchorage Mayor’s Marathon.

And, “anything in the Willow area, for sure,” she said.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.