READY, SET, RESTART

SKWENTNA — What drives four-time Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race champion Lance Mackey and his dog team?

“I’d rather be on the back of a sled than anywhere else,” he answered a young fan who asked at the Skwentna Checkpoint Sunday night.

In the last decade, Wasilla-grown Lance Mackey has notched an unequaled list of wins in sled dog racing, bested cancer and a cocaine addiction, and now rides the runners in search of a fifth consecutive win in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Lance said he remembers standing at the finish line at age 7 when his father, Dick Mackey, famously won the 1978 race by one second.

When Lance’s oldest brother Rick won in 1983, he became the first legacy winner, a feat unequaled until younger brother Lance won the race in 2007.

Their father co-founded the race with Joe Redington Sr. in 1973. The two premier mushing families lived within 20 miles of each other for years. The Redingtons lived down Knik-Goose Bay Road in Wasilla and the Mackey family on their homestead up Pittman Road. Lance said he lived in Meadow Lakes for the first 15 years of his life, and it was in Wasilla as a second-grader where he met his future wife, Tonya.

He’s the third son — Rick, Bill, Lance and Jason — born to sprint-dog racer Kathie Bliss and distance musher Dick Mackey. The two divorced when Lance was 10 and Dick left the Valley.

Kathie worked long hours flying Bush planes and washing dishes to take care of her sons, Lance said.

On the weekends, he said he and his brothers would take the dog team to Bench Lake and camp out until it was time to come home for school.

“A lot of those houses and subdivisions weren’t there then,” Lance Mackey said. “We were in the middle of nowhere.”

Growing up, he said his parents taught them the old skills necessary to live in the wilderness and the new skills needed to navigate city life.

“I still want my kids to be able to survive in the wilderness,” he said. “They need to know the old ways and the new ways, too.”

When he and his brothers carried knives and lighters to school and a .22 to the bus stop, they were tools for survival, not weapons.

“We needed the .22 to get past the moose in the driveway, or we might get to shoot a rabbit on the way to the bus,” he said.

But after getting into trouble repeatedly with the law and his mother as a young man, he said she made the decision to ship him north at age 15 to live with his father, who by then had started a business in a bus selling food to truckers on the Dalton Highway. The Cold Foot Truck Stop had grown into a lucrative business by 1990 when Dick Mackey sold it.

Lance says the influence of the truckers and their drug habits led him farther down a path toward cocaine addiction that would consume many years of his adult life.

But around the same time the Iditarod celebrated its 25th anniversary, Lance Mackey kicked his addiction and refocused his energy on his earliest and closest companions — dogs.

In March 2001, Lance Mackey finished his rookie Iditarod in 36th place. On the trail, he’d become increasingly concerned about symptoms such as headaches, blurry vision and blackouts. He said he went directly from the finish line to the Nome hospital to get checked out. There doctors diagnosed the problem as throat cancer and 10 days later removed his salivary glands and a softball-sized tumor, along with the skin and muscle tissue surrounding it.

Then when the index finger on his left hand sustained nerve damage and became painful during radiation treatments, he persuaded doctors to amputate it.

He had a feeding tube in place when he competed in 2002, but scratched 440 miles in. After taking a few years off from distance mushing, he returned to the Yukon Quest as a rookie in 2005. He won the race that year and for the next three to earn a spot as the only four-time Yukon Quest winner in race history.

“Somebody’s watching out for me and rewarding me for the changes,” Mackey said.

Encouraged by his success in the Yukon Quest, the Valley native returned to the Iditarod in 2007 and accomplished what had seemed impossible — winning the Yukon Quest and Iditarod races in the same year just weeks apart.

Adverse to the word “can’t,” Lance repeated the feat in 2008. And in 2009, he became the third musher ever to sweep three Iditarods in a row. In 2010 he claimed a new title as the only musher with four consecutive Iditarod wins.

Success is a lot of work and a bit of luck, the champ says. “A lot of life is what you make it.”

For his own children, Lance said he wants the same sort of childhood spent growing up in the woods.

“You got to have a tree in your backyard,” he said.

So far this year, Lance Mackey is out in front and several serious contenders are giving chase. His team was first into Rainy Pass at 2:07 p.m., Monday. The team was first into Rohn, where they stopped for 17 minutes before heading out again.

Giving chase out of Rohn were Hugh Neff, who left 22 minutes later and Sebastian Schnuelle, who left about an hour after that.

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.