Iditarod mushers say canine athletes nearing full potential

NOME — Veteran musher Ray Redington Jr. says the Iditarod is getting “damn near just as fast” as mid-distance sled dog races like the Copper Basin 300 and Kuskokwin 400 — but mushers know there’s a limit to how fast they can go.

Willow’s Wade Marrs, who finished a career-best fourth in this year’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race said that has a lot to do with the dogs.

“We’re running animals here, we’re not running robots,” Marrs said at a table in a quiet corner of Nome’s mini convention center on Thursday. “If we had robots we’d just fall asleep on our sleds and go from the start to the finish non-stop.”

Marrs’s point was that both he and his dogs have basic needs that must be constantly met.

“They have to be taken care of, they have to be nurtured, they have to have their rest,” he said. Big Lake’s Martin Buser, who finished 37th this year, said that, even if a musher cloned the most exceptional sled dog ever bred, it probably wouldn’t make a team that could run the length of the Iditarod Trail in 7 days.

He compared it to the creation of a football team that only had quarterbacks.

“I don’t think if you had 52 Cam Newton’s they would be assured to win the Super Bowl,” Buser said, referencing the MVP-winning quarterback of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers.

But there’s a more sure sign that mushers are quickly approaching the fastest possible Iditarod finishes, he said. He mentioned the well-established Kentucky Derby — which hasn’t seen a horse run faster than Secretariat in 1973 — as an example of animal athletes reaching their fullest potential.

“The variances are now because of track conditions, time of the year, weather, but horses are where they are,” he said.

And perhaps dogs soon will be, too, he added.

Willow’s Dallas Seavey, who claimed his fourth Iditarod win early Tuesday morning, agreed with Buser’s assessment of future Iditarod records.

“As these dogs get better and better, we’re gonna see smaller increments of improvement,” Seavey said. “If you go back to the beginning of the race, they were taking a day off the record, and now we’re down to taking a couple hours off the record. Soon it’ll be taking a couple minutes off the record.

This year, Seavey and his dogs broke the record — which his team set in 2014 — by 1 hour and 44 minutes. By contrast, the 1981 record of 12 days, 8 hours, 45 minutes set by Rick Swenson was broken by Susan Butcher in 1986 by 17 hours and 39 minutes. The very first Iditarod race, won by Dick Wilmarth in 1973 in 20 hours, 49 minutes, 41 seconds, was topped by Emmitt Peters two years later by more than five days.

Though Seavey’s not betting on a 7-day race of his own, he speculated a run down the 975-mile trail from Willow to Nome in less than eight days might be possible.

“I think 8 days flat is within my career or lifetime for sure. I think 7 (days) 12 (hours) is probably getting near the limits of what sled dogs may be able to do.”

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