Episode 2: Trail! cover art

Episode 2: Trail!

Episode 2: Trail!

Listen for free

View show details

About this listen

 The race begins! Will talks to us about the oddity of finally being on the Iditarod. The team is passed… A few times! The phone is put into a precarious position. Listen on Apple Podcasts • View Plain Text Transcript Check out the emails that Buddies received as the race was beginning! Here’s the Lineup for Iditarod 2021!!! Getting Set And they’re off! More photos from today View Transcript Onward and Other Directions Episode 2: Trail! Hi, I’m Will. I live with 28 dogs and together we travel across the winter landscape of Alaska. They run and I hang on to a rickety sled behind them. Our team is called ATAO Kennel. This is Onward and Other Directions, a podcast where I take you along our first Iditarod through recordings I made throughout the race in March of 2021. The Iditarod is one of the longest sled dog races in the world. And I’ve been working towards running it since I started mushing in the year 2000. This episode is the first recording on the race. The team and I have left the starting line and are on our way. We’re traveling along wide braided rivers towards Skwentna, the first resupply checkpoint in the race. We will actually end up stopping to camp about 10 miles before Skwentna at mile 50 of the race as part of our race plan. This recording is a few hours into the run and a few hours before we camp. [Musical transition] All right. Are we recording? I can’t tell Oh, looks like it. All right. Well, we’re a couple hours into the Iditarod. Maybe I’ll throw in some cool audio from the start. I really didn’t have the capacity to record then. Also, I have no idea how these recordings are gonna sound. They could just totally be garbage. But I gotta keep having to stop and wave at people. A lot of people were on the river still, that we’ll be on for, uh, another like, well, like a total of 80 miles basically. Er, yeah, about 80 miles, I think. And then, um, and then we’ll finally kind of head up into the mountains, but. Yup. Still on the river and there’ve been a lot of snowmachiners and families and little camps waving us on. [Loudly aside to someone else] Oh, sorry. Whoa. You moved faster than I thought. You guys ready? [Back towards the audience] That was Aaron Burmeister calling trail to pass. And, uh, I’m sure you can hear the plane noise. [To someone else] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. [To audience] People saying good luck and see you next week. Also, there’s a plane landing about, I don’t know, twenty feet away from me. The dogs don’t seem to care. It is… It’s really weird to see so many people when you’re mushing. And I’m guessing [To the dogs] Haw! Haw! [To audience] I’m guessing that they, uh — there’s a person walking down the river, and the dogs wanted to go over to her. [To the person walking] My dogs thought you were calling them. My dogs thought you were calling them. [To audience] Yeah, it’s uh weird. Yeah, unfortunately, I don’t know how COVID friendly the, uh, these gatherings are. Mostly seems like it’s kind of like individual families and they’re far apart from each other. But I definitely think this is one fear that holding the Iditarod, you know, kind of incurred. Um. Anyway, I feel kinda silly that I didn’t hear Aaron calling trail. He gave me some really good advice about nutrition, but um. Anyway. When you call trail, the other person’s supposed to stop and pull over. Which I did, as soon as I realized, um, what was going on. I thought it was somebody else yelling, cause we were kind of in so much commotion there. It’s a really hot day. It finally started to cool off a little bit, but when we left it was in the high 20s, and the sun was just beating down, and these guys have not really been running at that kind of a temperature. We did do a run, the last run we did ended up in the 20s, but, I mean, that’s just like not been our norm. So, um, I feel like they’re moving just a little bit slower. I also made the mistake of, um, uh, they had kind of a bigger meal before we took off, which I didn’t intend for them to have, and, um, they probably should have just had like a broth. So we did our first snack stop and they were like, eh, I’m good. [To someone else] Thank you. Oh! Alright! [To audience] That guy told us “It’s all about fun.” [Others in background] Good luck! [Will, replying] Thank you. [Others] Have fun! [Will, replying] Thank you. [Will, to audience] There’s a lot of kids. And when I tell them, thank you, about half of them say You’re welcome. Like, yeah, you should thank me. That’s pretty funny. Anyway, these guys are moving slow. But it’s hard because I mean, notoriously this first leg, you really want to go fast. So maybe it’s kind of a blessing in disguise that it’s a little hotter. And these guys don’t really want to move as fast. Because ideally, we’re going between eight and nine miles on this first leg, average. And that’s exactly where ...
No reviews yet