Iditarod 2013 – Day 1
The real racing got under way at 2PM AKST [5PM CST] at Willow with teams leaving on at 2 minute intervals. The teams have to take a 24-hour break on the trail, an 8-hour break on the Yukon, and a final 8-hour break at White Mountain. The start time differential is corrected as part of the 24-hour break.
Dalles Seavey won last year by treating the race as a series of sprints, while John Baker won the year before by maintaining a consistent marathon pace. The weather and trail conditions will govern the most successful strategy.
Only 65 teams will be racing as Ed Stielstra (41) scratched at Campbell Airfield at the end of the parade. He was injured in a training run in late February and knew he couldn’t make the entire race, something he has done 7 times before. Ed is from McMillan, Michigan, so I assume he had already paid for everything and wasn’t going to get his money back, so now he can watch in comfort.
Please note that I have made the decision not to be an ‘Iditarod Insider’, which, among other things, would give me access to the GPS tracking. The Iditarod is very corporate, and the information they provide through their ‘Insider’ is certainly encumbered with non-disclosure and a lot of legal barriers. I follow the race in a blog. If I can’t put what I find out on the blog, it is worthless to me. They would probably want a licensing agreement and controls on what I do with the information. Not going to happen.
All 65 teams are on the trail as of 4:10PM AKST [7:10PM CST]: [Read more →]
March 3, 2013 4 Comments
