The Iditarod High : There’s No Experience Like It, Defending Champion Buser Says

In nine years of mushing the Iditarod trail, Martin Buser has seen it all. And then some.

Once he saw a freight train parked along the trail. A friend started grabbing his dogs, tying them up and throwing them into a box car. Only thing is, there isn’t a railroad within miles of the trail. And Buser’s friend was nowhere near that remote area.

The long, dark, cold and lonely hours take their toll. Eyes blurred by days of subfreezing wind see trees move and faces lurking in the shadows. A brain numbed by lack of sleep has little will to resist the hallucinations but accepts them and goes on.

Buser isn’t superstitious or even exceptionally religious, but he says he felt a guardian angel’s presence when he finally won the race last year, in record time.

“Something crawled down my neck inside my clothes, down my arms and legs and right through my body, like it was checking me out,” Buser said by phone a few days ago. “And then it left. It didn’t frighten me, and after that I had a sense of calmness that I hadn’t felt before, like it had given me its approval.”

Thus reassured, Buser won the race covering 1,049 miles of Alaskan wilderness from Anchorage to Nome in 10 days 19 hours 17 minutes 15 seconds. The time broke four-time winner Susan Butcher’s record of 11:01:53:23 and the Anchorage Daily News described it as “the Iditarod equivalent of the four-minute mile.” He beat the runner-up, Butcher, by almost 10 hours--a runaway by Iditarod standards.

He will defend his championship starting March 6 with the 21st running of what promoters call “the last great race on earth.” Skeptics allow that license, although some say it might not even be the toughest sled dog race, merely the best known. But who is to quibble under those conditions?

Buser’s nearest pursuers fought through a ground blizzard the final day, taking turns on the pace. For four days in the middle of the race, Buser said, the temperature hung at 54 degrees. Minus -54. And that’s not figuring a windchill factor.

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Buser, 34, moved from Switzerland to Alaska in 1979, settling in Big Lake, about an hour and a half from Anchorage by truck, a little longer by dog sled. He met a Louisianian, Kathy Chapoten, who had gone north to see what winter was like and stayed to marry Buser. They have two sons and own a few dozen dogs, because that’s what Buser does--raise sled dogs.

“Good nutrition is a key part of it,” he says, plugging his sponsor, Eagle Premium Pet Food. “Good dogs, the coaching, the training all contributed.”

A high-fat dog diet is important. A dog will lose three or four pounds during the race, so the smart handlers fatten them up for the grind.

Although many top mushers alternate their lead dogs to save their strength, Buser’s primaries are D-2 and Tyrone, both Alaskan huskies he bred. D-2 is the son of Dagger, a former lead dog, and earned his spot by showing leadership qualities. Six dogs from D-2’s litter started the ’92 race with Buser; five finished. Buser believes that a happy dog is a fast dog.

“If I maintain a happy attitude, I think the dogs benefit,” Buser told the Anchorage Daily News after his victory, which earned him $50,000 and a truck. “I wanted them to be mellow and calm so they could rest when they needed rest and so they could run when they needed to run. I think we found that balance.”

There is some mandatory rest time and 25 check points, although the mushers aren’t required to use all of them and often camp out on the trail.

“We run on a 50-50 schedule,” Buser said, “run for four hours and rest for four hours. Check points are really only fuel stations. There is no great benefit of spending your long rests in the check points vs. out of the check points. You can stop anywhere. The longest section without check points is 120 miles. We establish well thought out travel and rest patterns for our teams and adhere to that. The time doesn’t stop.”

It’s difficult for a musher to restrain himself when a rival races past.

“You’re darned right,” Buser said. “That’s part of the excitement. The smart racers pay very little attention to the competition.

“I’ll pass (five-time winner) Rick Swenson taking a nap along the side of the trail. He has fed his dogs, bedded them down, taken care of their feet, and then he’ll take a 20- or 30-minute nap. Well, while he’s napping I’m going by him. And then after another two hours I’m taking my rest when he goes by me. The race is so long that you can’t worry about it.”

The ’92 race started after a heavy storm, which made the early going slow.

“There was a lot of fresh snow on the trail,” Buser said. “After the first day and a half, we were way behind any race schedules. We joked about how the 20th Iditarod was going to be as slow as the first, which took about 20 days. Then slowly but surely the trail conditions improved and my dogs really started going good.”

Past the halfway point, Buser was feeling comfortable about his position when he came upon Butcher and Swenson and a couple of others.

“When we got there they were taking a long rest and I was taking over the lead,” Buser said. “I really didn’t want to be there (in the lead).”

So he stopped farther on.

“I had bedded down the dogs on straw for four hours and I’d slept an hour myself. Then I went outside to see how the dogs were and they were all up and ready to go, biting each other, playfully. It was like, ‘OK, here he is, let’s go.’ ”

Buser pointed out that sled dogs don’t have to be coaxed to run.

“They’re bred to run,” he said. “They kept building momentum and getting stronger and stronger. The dogs were peaking at the right time. Halfway through, they all started peaking together . . . a pretty phenomenal occurrence. The farther we went, the stronger they got, the faster they got. They were ready to rumble on down the Yukon River.”

That’s where Buser passed the leaders, Doug Swingley of Montana and ’89 winner Joe Runyan, who had broken away from the pack hoping to build an insurmountable lead. But Buser didn’t think they could sustain their pace, and he was right.

“From there I just kept building my lead,” he said. “At one point, my pursuers were looking at my split times between check points and realized they were not going to catch me.”

Buser used a shirt for a sail on his sled to catch a tail wind across the Kaltag Portage to the coast of the Bering Sea, then breezed past Swingley and Runyan. He knew he was in front--the check points told him that--but he wasn’t sure by how much.

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“It’s racing in a vacuum,” he said. “I had no idea how close my competition was. I was real worried. The very last hill we had to climb--Top Kok--I had the rock music playing in my headset and then the theme from ‘Rocky.’ ”

He raced under the wooden arch in Nome at 4:17 a.m. as thousands cheered.

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The mushers can start with up to 20 dogs but can’t substitute any.

“Some we fly home as we go,” Buser said. “Rather than running a dog on a potential injury or a cut foot, we fly ‘em home to our kennels.”

Others are removed to improve maneuverability. Buser finished with 13 of the 20 dogs he started with--higher than the average.

“One of the trail vets (noted) that they were standing there at the finish line wagging their tails and wondering where the next check point was,” Buser said.

Swenson and Butcher are the only multiple winners of the Iditarod and Swenson gave Buser his highest praise.

“Martin’s a real dog musher,” Swenson said. “He builds his own sleds and makes his own gear, but it’s not like he’s some hippie living in a wall tent and picking his teeth with a Bowie knife. He’s a civilized family man.”

Buser said: “I never really raced for the record, just for the win. The record just kind of happened along the trail.”

And it was no hallucination.