On a different subject...

I was really glad to see Lance Mackey win the Iditarod again this year. I grew up racing sprint dogs and I'm not really into distance mushing but I admire the effort these people put into racing.
My dad ran the Iditarod in 1986 and received the "Red Lantern" ( http://www.iditarod.com/learn/traditions.html ) which is more of an accomplishment than I think I could achieve. Twenty days behind a dog team is more than I ever desired, I preferred running for about thirty minutes behind fourteen to twenty dogs and then go somewhere that had a hot shower. A strong dislike of sleeping in the cold and lack of hot showers is probably why I'm not a distance dog musher or a mountaineer.
There are several other mushers that I know better than Lance, but the reason I was glad to see Lance win again is because of a conversation I had with him in early January 2007. Both last year and again this year Sandi volunteered to be a race veterinarian for the Cantwell Classic, a 200 mile mid-distance race across the Denali Highway . This year I didn't go with her due to being in Algeria but last year I went and we camped out at a checkpoint that was the first and last checkpoint (due to turning around at the halfway point) and checked the teams as they came through. I sat in a the warmup tent ( http://tysonsdaily.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html ) and talked to Lance for quite awhile, we talked about sprint racing versus distance and all of the work involved in both. Lance said he was thinking that maybe he should try something different than distance racing. Between all of the work and frostbite he said that he thought something like the Wyoming Stage Stop would be fun to do and would be a nice change from distance racing. I didn't think much of it at the time but reflecting back on it, it was a really cool conversation. Later that month he won the Yukon Quest and then the Iditarod in March and this year he had a repeat of both. A task never achieved by anyone previously, much less two years in a row. I just think it is really nice to see people who work really hard at something be successful.