The John Beargrease Sled Dog Race Permalink | 206 Comments
One of the nice things about vet school is that there are a lot of opportunities available to do fun activities that “mere mortals” don’t get a chance to do. So when an email showed up in my mailbox looking for vet students to volunteer for the vet checks at the annual John Beargrease Sled Dog Race I jumped at the chance.
The race is an annual event that runs from Duluth, Minnesota, to northern Minnesota and back. There is a “marathon” event that totals 400 miles, and a middle distance event. The marathon in the longest distance sled dog race in the lower 48 states and is a qualifing race for the Iditarod.
A few days after signing up for the vet check and getting an acceptance e-mail, we got an e-mail emphatically stating that contrary to rumor, the vet students would not be doing the vet checks, but, rather, assisting the vets by filling out paperwork and “marking” the dogs. So it was a little disappointing to discover that we wouldn’t be handling the dogs, but it still looked to be a unique opportunity nonetheless. My wife, Denise, also volunteered for the event and was able to get a volunteer slot in the “cutest puppy” contest that was also being held in conjunction with the event.
Although the racing wasn’t going to start until Sunday, the vet checks were being performed Saturday morning. Since we had to be in place and ready to go at 6:30 a.m., most of us decided to drive up the night before. After a week of relatively mild temperatures in the 20s and teens, the weekend forecast was calling for a dip back into sub-zero temps, so we made sure we brought plenty of warm cloths. Me and two of my classmates decided to skip our last class of the day (hey, he pretty much covers his notes verbatim anyway!) so that we could make the 2+ hour journey to Duluth in the daylight.
The trip was thankfully uneventful, and after checking into the hotel we cruised into the downtown in search of dinner. We ended up at a warehouse-like building that was sort of an in-town mall with little shops and restaurants and settled into a brewpub. The beer was good, the food just average. As we were leaving, we noticed placards on the wall denoting the “stations” that the contestants in the cutest puppy contest would be using. Denise had certainly lucked out on her volunteer duty - it would take place in the luxury of a heated building.
We awoke the next morning to -15 degree temperatures accompanied by a stiff breeze coming off of Lake Superior. We made sure that every bit of clothing we had brought was on our bodies. The check-in was in a parking lot of a bar/eatery across the street from the hotel (and right next to the aforementioned Lake Superior and its stiff winds). We checked in to the volunteer table and soon discovered what our role would be as part of the vet check. We were going to pair up in teams of two and hook up with a vet (or two) as he/she did the physical exams on the dogs of the various teams. One of the vet students would write down the results of the physicals in the musher’s log book, and the other would mark the dogs that passed the physicals with a grease crayon to eliminate any doubt that the dog was cleared to race.
We also discovered that there was an abundance of vet student volunteers in comparison to the number of vets. So we might be doing a lot of standing around for awhile until things picked up later in the morning we were told.
The first teams started arriving about 7:30 and we were officially on our way. My partner, Sarah, had done the Beargrease before so I let her be the record keeper for our first team so I could get an idea of what the procedure was. The variety of vehicles that the mushers transported their dogs and equipment in was incredibly varied - no two were alike. There were plenty of home-grown solutions, as well as the relatively cushy customized trailers with rows of dog compartments inside the trailer. All the rigs also had a way to run lines around the exteriors that the dogs were hooked up to while awaiting their physicals.
I learned a number of things during our first team physical. One was that the vets were surprisingly thorough in their physicals. Each dog was checked from head to tail, with special attention paid to their paws and the range of motion of each of their legs. Any physical concerns, no matter how small, were noted and written into the musher’s log. The marathon teams consisted of 14 dogs and a substitute, and the midlength teams consisted of 8 dogs and a substitute. So with upwards of 50 teams, there were a lot of dogs to look at.
Another thing I learned was that there was a lot of standing around in our jobs as vet check volunteers. While the vets poked and prodded the dogs, one in the team of vet check volunteers would write down any findings from the physical into the musher’s log book. The job of the other vet check volunteer was to mark each dog that had been checked with a grease pencil, the color of which indicated whether or not the dog had passed the physical and which also indicated whether the dog was entered into the mid-range race or the marathon.
A lot of standing around when it is -15 with a -37 wind chill results in frozen extremities in a rather short timeframe. When we were nearing completion of the check of our first team, my partner, Sarah, quickly handed me the musher’s log and clipboard and said that her hands were freezing. After completing the vet check for the team, I went into the bar to check on her and discovered that she wasn’t exaggerating. At all of about 4 foot 8 inches and 85 lbs., she had discovered, she said, what it was like to be the coldest she had ever been in her life. Her hands were only now progressing from the frozen solid stage to the numb, tingling stage. It would be another half hour before she felt her hands had thawed enough to go back out.
Over the course of the morning and afternoon, teams took turns braving the numbing temperatures and then coming back inside to thaw out. And we, of course, complained about the cold but it this instance we really had something to complain about. Yet, collectively, we were really just a bunch of wimps because while we were going through the freezing/thawing cycle, a number of the vets spent almost the entire time outside doing the vet checks. What makes this even more remarkable is that in order to properly do the physicals, they had to take their gloves off and use their bare hands. I’m not sure how they survived it, but from the looks of it most of them had plenty of previous experience - the vets wore jackets that had patches sewed on them from all the sled dog races they had volunteered at, and in most instances the jackets were almost completely covered by patches.
We finished up at 2 p.m. A number of us were heading home that afternoon, while others were staying overnight to help out the next day. Denise ended up staying the next day and got to see the start of the races along with several thousand other spectators.
As it turned out, while the conditions appeared ideal for the race, the low temperatures, cold, crusty snow, and fast pace took their toll on a vast majority of the teams. Of the 22 teams that stared in the marathon portion of the race on Sunday, only six ended up finished the race on Wednesday. This years race was won by the same guy who won it last year - apparently a very rare occurrence. The key, he said, was to not get caught up in the early hectic pace. He took his time at the start and let his top two dogs ride in the sled the first 120 miles of the race. It worked, and he went home $7,500 richer.
Note: I would like to thank my classmate, Jennifer Wilder, for all of the wonderful pictures that accommodate this story.