The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is now hogging the headlines — but a hardy band of bikers, skiers and runners have been traversing the trail for more than a week.
Fairbanksan Tyson Flaharty and Canadian Ryan Atkins led the way in the 306-mile trek from Knik to McGrath called the Iditarod Trail Invitational. They finished the 23rd annual race in a rare tie, calling a truce just miles from the finish after 2 days, 7 hours and 57 minutes of toil and revelry.
The “short” course, known as the ITI 350, began on February 27 and has now concluded, with Eagle River runner Sarah Hurkett the last of 49 finishers after nearly 8½ days.
The “long” course, the ITI 1,000-mile epic, soldiers on with 22 participants still heading to Nome, the slowest of whom may require nearly a month (the record is just over 10 days by Fairbanks biker Jeff Oatley in 2014). As of Wednesday, Petr Ineman of the Czech Republic was at mile 628. In the coming days, he’ll have a front-row view as the Iditarod mushers pass by.
Petr Ineman
The ITI 350 pitted a wily veteran and a talented rookie at the front.
The veteran was Flaharty, riding his fourth ITI. He ducked under the two-day milestone while winning in 2019, one of only five bikers to ever accomplish that feat.
The newcomer was Atkins, who has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2016 as a professional obstacle course racer. From Sutton, Quebec, he’s also an accomplished trail runner and mountain biker — although arguably his most valuable experience for ITI purposes was completing unsupported fat bike tours in northern Canada that lasted up to 11 days and covered 500-700 miles (and required setting up fences each night to deter polar bears).
With bikes not nearly as loaded down with gear — Flaharty rode a 9:ZERO:7 and Atkins a Fatback — and the ability to purchase meals at lodges along the route, the ITI pace was way faster than Atkins’ northern journeys. Flaharty, known for going out hard, set the pace the first half. After an early route-finding error forced them to push their bikes for maybe 90 minutes, Flaharty generally arrived at checkpoints a few minutes ahead of Atkins, who then followed Flaharty out the door to keep on his tail. The two were focused on their task and hardly socialized.
“I pushed the pace pretty hard for the first half for sure,” said Flaharty, 36.
The dynamics changed once they got through Rainy Pass in the Alaska Range and Atkins went to the front where he rode an ambitious pace the rest of the way.
Flaharty said there was very little separation between the two over the final 24+ hours. Flaharty only feared he’d been dropped one time when he lost sight of Atkins around a bend.
“I was really just not letting him get away. He was really consistent on his pace,” Flaharty said. “I think he was trying to get rid of me and see if I would crack.”
Atkins said that despite sleeping only 15 minutes the entire race his strength improved as the miles stacked up.
“After we got over Rainy Pass I started feeling really good. (I figured) if Tyson wants to finish with me, he’ll have to hang on,” Atkins said.
Tyson Flaharty and Ryan Atkins
The event felt more like an adventure than a race for Atkins and he refrained from attacking off the front in an effort to shed Flaharty.
The two navigated extremely rough trail between Rohn and Nikolai, where countless ruts, moguls and whoop-de-dos left by the Iron Dog snowmachine race had frozen hard. Atkins called them “three to four-foot bumps with vertical faces on them.”
“It was a terrible trail, like the worst I’ve ever seen,” Flaharty said. “It was 50 miles of bumps that beat the crap out of you.”
Miles of snowless trail in the Farewell Burn also posed a problem for skiers, but less so for bikers and runners.
In Nikolai, Atkins was getting curious how the end might play out and asked Flaharty “Are we going to race this thing or cruise in together?” Flaharty merely smiled in response but didn’t verbally answer the question.
Flaharty, 30, then continued to sit on Atkins’ wheel. Finally, on a road three miles from the finish, Flaharty told Atkins “If you want, you can just go. I’m not going to chase you.” Flaharty, who once aspired to make the Winter Olympics as a sprinter in Nordic skiing, felt it would have been unsportsmanlike to potentially outsprint Atkins for the win after the Canadian had been doing the bulk of the work for so long.
Atkins, 34, declined Flaharty’s offer. So the two rolled into McGrath side-by-side in a tie for first. The only other time that’s happened in the ITI 350 in 2006, when Rocky Reifenstuhl and Pete Basinger deadlocked. Atkins also became the first foreigner to win the ITI and one of the first rookies.
Atkins relished the experience — the worst thing that happened was falling into overflow early on — and plans to attempt the 1,000-mile ITI in the future.
“It was everything I was looking for: the right amount of challenge, the scenery was great, it was perfect,” said Atkins, who rebounded quickly enough to ski a backcountry tour from Arctic Valley Road to Prospect Heights trailhead a few days after ITI. “This race is pretty iconic. It’s something I had to do.”
Other division winners:
Women’s bike: Amber Bethe of Anchorage in 4:11:38 (first woman to complete all three modes of transportation after winning the women’s ski in 2021 and finishing second in the women’s foot division in 2020)
Men’s ski: Chet Fehrmann of Anchorage in 4:13:25 (second fastest ski time ever)
Women’s ski: Jaclyn Arndt of Homer, 7:22:20 in her first ITI
Men’s foot: Thierry Corbarieu of France in 5:19:44
Women’s foot: Fay Norby of Saint Paul, Minn., in 6:13:54
Oldest finisher: biker Frank Baccelli of Folsom, Calif., became the oldest ITI finisher at age 68 in 7:23:15