Iditarod

OK, so this post is really late.

Lance Mackey won the Iditarod!

OK, I don't know much about him - but he is an Alaskan (yay!) and a cancer survivor and married his high school sweetheart who is also a musher and they have four teenage kids and his father and brother both won the Iditarod and most of his sponsors were small local businesses and families.

Wow. And he won the Yukon Quest (the race I like best) four weeks before! Eight of the nine dogs finishing had run both races! That's amazing - that's 2100 miles in 40 days through really inclement weather - that's coast-to-coast down here. And he has no salivary glands (from the cancer) so didn't take time to eat much of the way because he has to chase food with water and it's too time-consuming. But clearly he took much better care of his dogs.

But the best is watch this video on his website. Watch the dog - too funny. Proud and sleepy.

Mushers amaze me - over and over. I am in awe.

Oh, I missed this (no news of Iditarod here in Louisiana) - Ramy Brooks beat ("spanked") his dogs and one died (though not from the beating). Clearly, that's messed up. But I think about all the people who abuse animals (and children) regularly with no consequences, and in contrast the vast majority of mushers treat their dogs very well (with the exception of people like those I knew in Elim who just didn't want to mush anymore so just stopped feeding their chained-up dogs and they all starved to death - again, they're not real mushers). How many dogs here die of obesity from lack of exercise and unhealthy food? From being lost, hit by traffic? From being killed because that cute puppy grew into a big dog and nobody wanted it? From being abandoned when its family fled a hurricane?

Dogs die. It's a fact of life, and with the dogs dying in the Iditarod, it's a lot like Jim Fixx dying. Athletes living and running hard until the heart stops.

Selma has a damn good life, but there are few things that give her the joy that I see in sled dogs every time they get hooked up to run. She would sometimes look at them jealously (and a little suspiciously), wondering what they were so worked up about. Barring swallowing another latex glove, she'll live a long life - she's already almost 13, and she's got a good number of years left in her. But would she cut that life in half to run her little heart out in a race? I guess I'll never know. But we all know that she'd leave me in a heartbeat if there's dry fish involved in the bargain.