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The long, hard race -- Iditasport Impossible
By foot or by bike, athletes follow Iditarod trail to Nome
By Craig Medred / Anchorage Daily News
By the end, after weeks of wallowing in deep snow and battling headwinds that blew the frozen tundra bare, only four of the 20 athletes who began the 1,000-mile Iditasport Impossible race crossed the finish line in Nome.
Weary and frost-nipped, the first of them -- Big Lake's Mike Estes and Englishman Andrew Heading -- wobbled into the Gold Coast city on mountain bikes Thursday night in late March.
About 12 hours behind came the other two -- never-say-die runners Tom Jarding and Tim Hewitt from Pennsylvania.
Once again, simple human determination had proven the Impossible possible.
After the Feb. 24 start of the human-powered endurance race along the fabled Iditarod Trail, it was uncertain for a while whether anyone could make it from Knik to Nome this year.
''I wouldn't do the southern route (of the Iditarod Trail) again,'' Heading said Friday. ''We must have walked 500 or 600 miles, pushing the bikes. That was not fun.''
Often the snow was too deep to ride. Other times there was too little snow to fill the voids between the frozen tussocks.
And so the bikers pushed and pushed and pushed some more.
''It was brutal,'' Heading said. ''I can think of no better way to describe it. I don't know what the temperatures were. They're so far off the scale of anything I know. We were just in survival mode for the last 10 or 14 days.''
First there was too much snow, Hewitt said, then wind, bad trail, too little snow and extreme cold -- down to minus 38 degrees when the runners stopped outside of White Mountain Wednesday night.
''I guess that's just Alaska,'' Heading said. ''Nothing's predictable.''
Among even the fittest and strongest, the punishment the weather dishes out in wild Alaska can crush the toughest pysche.
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