endurance also became nearly inexhaustible as the years passed and he grew into the prime of his athletic life. Even in those rare instances when we could read fatigue beginning to build in him, he never slowed down or gave up until the job was done. He always found that last gear and rallied to the finish line. Sure, there were a handful of times he had to be picked up late in a race because he was too tired to continue, but we made the decision in his best interests. He never quit on us.
Goliath’s willingness to perform was tough to spot to the casual observer though. At hookup, a time when the excitement level of most dogs reaches critical mass, Goliath seemed to keep his excitement in check, internalizing his emotions.
While the dog next to him would be shrieking in frenzied excitement, springing vertically into the air with cappuccino-thick foam bubbling from its mouth, Goliath would grab a mouthful of gangline and quietly tug on it in eager, albeit subdued, anticipation while simultaneously leaning as far away from his running partner as his lines would allow. He felt as jazzed as any other dog in the team, he just showed it differently. He had vigor and skill, and his own distinct style, all of which could be said about most of our dogs. But Goliath had more than that even, a trait the others didn’t. He had couth.
All of this is what made the loudmouthed musher’s disparaging comments a jab in my side, and Cole’s too, but we fought back our initial urge to bludgeon him with the feeding ladle in our hands and kept our cool. We casually looked over at this guy’s own dogs, made up mostly of German short-haired pointer crosses: hybrids known to be fast, but with the trade-off of thinner coats and less body fat, two things that can really keep a dog warm.
Much like linear algebra and interpretive dance, this is something I’ve never understood. Why when racing in some of the most inhospitable weather on the planet—where the mercury routinely plummets to hellish depths where the burn is a cold one—would anyone intentionally breed for speed at the cost of a thick, potentially life-saving, coat of fur?
“Yeah, his coat is a bit thicker than what your dogs have got, but he’s a finisher in these kinds of cold conditions. You’ll see tomorrow,” I said, trying to make it sound more like a compliment to Goliath than a challenge to this musher.
“We’ll see,” he said without the slightest note of interest, then snickered in a patronizing manner and went back to minding his own business, not a moment too soon for us.
The next morning we were greeted with a race report that seemed quite pleasant in terms of our experiences with this event in the past. The trail was said to be hard-packed and fast, the winds calm, and the daytime temperature predicted to be a comfortable minus twenty for the start, with a dip to minus forty-five at night for the portion of trail that ran along the frozen Susitna River where the denser, colder air always settled.
This prerace narrative promised a much better situation than Cole and the dogs faced in the past. She had competed in three of the previous four years, including the brutal 2008 race, when the weather was nothing short of a maelstrom. Hurricane-force winds combined with savage cold to make a windchill of minus eighty-five. It was a race where Cole really cut her teeth as a musher.
From the beginning of that race, the wind moaned in an eerie, unearthly manner. Foreboding snow dunes had been carved and their wild, sinuous shapes erased all signs of the packed trail along with the lathes marking the way. Some mushers became disoriented or disheartened and turned around before the halfway point. A few had to be rescued by Army National Guardsmen who happened to be volunteering for the race to practice their own cold-weather training skills.
Other teams were literally picked up by the wind and blown down into an easily fifty-yard-deep couloir with other racers that had suffered a similar fate. There, past the precipice, huge tangles occurred that required the dangerous task of taking hands out of mittens to unclip and re-clip dogs into the ganglines in order to straighten them out. In those temperatures, flesh becomes frostbitten in a matter of seconds.
Many of those who were skilled—or just plain lucky enough—to eventually make it to the finish, didn’t do so unscathed. Some had minor frostbite to their faces or fingers, and at least one musher with improper boots cold-burned both his big toes black as coal, and eventually had to have them amputated to prevent gangrene.
We were shocked and saddened to see how many veteran mushers, including past Iditarod champions, were caught ill-prepared and hadn’t packed proper cold-weather protective gear for their dogs—garments such as fleece or windproof jackets, and most importantly for the males, fox-fur jockstraps, informally called “peter-heaters.” As a result, numerous huskies in other teams hit the finish with frostbite to their ears, tails, and most painfully of all, their penis-sheaths and tips.
Cole, on the other hand, went into every race hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. She had planned and packed for the frozen hell she had encountered and as a result, her team looked as good at the finish line as they did 200 miles earlier at the start. I wasn’t the only one who noticed: so did the race marshals, who presented Cole with the Humanitarian Award, a coveted prize given to the musher who displays the best dog care during the event. This was in addition to her second-place prize money.
It was the third time she had placed second in the race and Goliath was on her team for each event, but for this running—even before the other musher had shot off his mouth—Cole wanted to whittle her placement in the standings by one more spot.
We scrutinized over past years’ training-mileage journals looking for areas to make improvements. We swam the dogs in a nearby pond for cardiovascular conditioning during the warm weather months, and from the time the Alaskan winter began to kill summer in its inimitable way—by smothering the world in that intermediate color that has no color—Cole and I rigorously trained the dogs by having them pull us on four-wheelers. For weeks we endured gray rain falling from gray clouds in a completely gray sky, as we conditioned teams on beaches with gray sand, gray stones, and next to gray water. Our world was gray, but we sucked it up in the hopes of having the dogs peak for this Gin Gin, and peak they did.
The first fifty-mile leg went great for Cole. She had the fastest time of the whole race field and couldn’t believe it. I too competed in the race with a puppy team, and by the time I came in to the first checkpoint, she had been there long enough to have finished all her chores. I was kneeling down, rubbing balm onto the wrists of one of my dogs when she found me.
“I’m leading and don’t know how. I’m the most conservative musher I know and I’m rating them down on the down hills,” she said in a giddy sense of disbelief with her own performance.
“That’s great, hon,” I said sincerely from under the heavy weight of my fur-lined parka hood. “But shouldn’t you be asleep by now?”
“Can’t,” she replied. “Too excited.”
I did my best to get her to go lie down for at least a little while. She never did get in the winks she should have, but it didn’t seem to hold her back. I came out of the lodge that served as a checkpoint to see her and the team off. In the distance, even in the low light I could see Goliath leading the charge out. His coat looked silver in the pale blue light of the quarter moon.
On the second leg of the race, the course followed the always frigid 110-mile run down the river. It was a long, long night run and with the mercury plummeting to the predicted minus forties or below for most of the trip, it made for an inhospitable evening.
For those who have never experienced these temps, or exposure to them beyond walking to and from the car on a cold winter morning, they are tough to endure for any length of time, but spending fourteen hours in them while standing still and fatigued on a sled is absolutely brutal.
Take
