Forest Lake Times - Sprint to finish line pays off for Anderson

Sprint to finish line pays off for Anderson

Thursday, 13 March 2008

By Gwen Holdman

Ken managed to barely hang on to 4th place in a sprint to the finish line against Martin Buser on Wednesday. After they left Safety just one minute apart, apparently neither of them was able to gain a real advantage on the other.

Their 2-man duel went back to several miles before Safety. Ken said Martin Buser had a slightly higher cruising speed than he did, and so Martin was able to catch Ken somewhere between White Mountain and Safety. However, he was never able to pull away because Ken’s team had a faster top end gear than Martin’s did.

It sounded like Martin was also plagued with some leader issues, at least from some of Ken’s descriptions.

He certainly tried every trick in the book to get away from Ken. Eventually, Ken was able to open a small gap when he passed Martin and called up his team. He hoped that Martin would basically give up at some point, but he never did. He kept working hard and never let Ken get too far ahead.

Ken knew he needed a little bit of a gap, because he anticipated a few leader problems of his own as he pulled into Nome. As he was coming off the beach, apparently his leaders did pick a wrong trail (there are a lot of trails out there) and he had to run up to the front of the team to pull them over to the right trail. He said he was sprinting as hard as he could, but Martin closed to within about 50 feet at that point.

Luckily, Ken’s leaders knew where they were going when they got onto Front Street, and they made it to the finish without further incident with Martin close behind. Ken finished with Ochocco and Surya in lead. Surya is a sister to Okayo and Jango, who were in lead yesterday, and Ochocco is her niece.

I was surprised to see those two up there since they don’t see that much time in lead under normal circumstances, but Ken said that Ochocco in particular has been a real spark plug at the end of races. She also finished in lead in the Quest.

After we got the dogs fed and bedded, we headed to our host family’s house, Terry and Randy Romanesko. This is our second year staying with them, and they have been really terrific in opening up their home to us.

Ken is now taking a nap, and after he wakes up in a couple hours he’ll probably want to get some real food into him. He was mumbling something about a really good burrito before he fell asleep.

The dogs look really good. It is going to be interesting arranging to send 15 dogs home from Nome, especially considering Ken only sent seven airline kennel here!

I am going to work on arrangements now, and then head down to the dog yard for an official drug test for the dogs in about an hour. They test all the teams to make sure no illegal substances are being used, but this really is not an issue in dog mushing – I think especially since there is not that much money involved!