Dan Dent knows he's probably too old, too heavy and too tall for big-time dog sled racing. And his ZIP code is all wrong.
But never mind. The 57-year-old, 6-foot-4, 205-pound financial manager from Baltimore is about to set out on the adventure of his life -- a 1,100-mile dash alone across the frozen Alaskan wilderness in the famously grueling Iditarod race from Anchorage to Nome.
The 27th running of "The Last Great Race" begins Saturday.
Dent hasn't got a prayer of winning. He's raced only three times, and never longer than 300 miles. Most of his training in the past year has been behind handlebars or a tennis racket, not huskies.
Truth be told, Dent has become the race's comic relief, the self-described "Rodney Dangerfield of the mushing circuit." After a Web site misprint listed him as "Dan Dirt," he became known to Alaskans as "Dirty Dan." Anchorage sports writers toss him off as "some guy from Baltimore."
And in a race the equivalent of sledding from Baltimore to New Orleans -- in which half the rookies typically drop out along the way -- Dent's immediate goal is simply to finish.
But the larger purpose of his daring, or madness, is to raise $500,000 in pledges to benefit Baltimore's Police Athletic League.
With Dent at the starting line will be D'Antoine Webb, 14, a PAL kid from Pimlico Middle School. D'Antoine's cheery confidence, and a contest essay about yearning "to look Danger in the eye while it calls my name," won him a trip to Alaska and a ceremonial, opening-day ride on Dent's sled.
D'Antoine said his friends were blown away by his success, and "now everybody's interested in jumping into the PAL program." Loaded down with thermal gear, cameras and (sorry, kid) a week's worth of homework, D'Antoine left for Anchorage yesterday. He was escorted by city police officer Roderick Henry.
Their whirlwind week in Alaska will include museums, banquets, a bush-plane ride over glaciers and the Iditarod trail, and a visit with race veterinarians as they examine the teams. His big wish is to see some wildlife, especially Alaskan salmon. "Those salmon look pretty feisty," he said.
After his return next Monday, he'll join kids at PAL centers across the city following Dent's progress on the Internet.
Dent is president of D.F. Dent & Co. He is also a PAL board member and neighbor to Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier.
It was Dent's love of dogs, cold weather and the Alaska wilderness that led him from a 1995 dogsled vacation to competitive mushing by 1998. But it was in the solitude of a 300-mile race last winter that he conceived a way to leverage his passion to benefit PAL's kids.
Baltimore's 27 PAL centers serve more than 7,000 children, providing them with a safe place to go after school and cultural and athletic opportunities. Pledges toward Dent's Iditarod run will help raise the $1.3 million in private donations PAL needs each year. Dent is paying all his own race expenses, and those of Webb and Henry -- more than $200,000 in all.
Two lessons
But it's more than the money. Dent wants his adventure -- and D'Antoine's -- to teach PAL kids two things: they should "reach for any aspirations that they might have in spite of people telling them it's beyond their reach," and "if you pursue a goal with honesty and passion, it's OK to fail."
Dent's unlikely resume and slender prospects have become a sort of running joke in Alaska, and he seems to cherish the role of comic underdog. He's even prepared tongue-in-cheek soundbites for reporters who find him at the starting line: "I hope Nuska [his lead dog] knows the way to Nome."
"He ain't gonna win the race," said Joe Redington Jr., the octogenarian "father" of the Iditarod. "But he'll do all right."
If Dent does finish, it will likely be five days or a week behind the leaders. Even that would be a genuine personal triumph over deadly serious threats: frostbite, whiteouts, equipment breakdowns, angry moose and getting lost.
But more than anything, Dent is racing for acceptance in the hardscrabble fraternity of Alaskan mushers, whose love of dogs, solitude and physical challenge will never bring them the wealth and privilege Dent enjoys.
"They train like Olympic athletes, work like farmers, and steal from piggy banks to prepare for the race," he said. He has enormous respect for them, and gratitude for their tolerance and generosity toward him and his dreams.
Among the top contenders are defending champ Jeff King; Rick Swenson, the race's only five-time champion; and DeeDee Jonrowe, who finished second last year. They're competing for a top prize of $50,000 in cash and a new truck.
Dent is one of 16 rookies -- seven foreigners and nine non-Alaskan Americans -- in this year's race.
The first Iditarod was organized in 1973 by Redington, who sought to save both mushing and the 50-pound Alaskan huskies from oblivion as more and more Alaskans turned to snowmobiles.
The race is now an industry, drawing packs of tourists, international media and corporate sponsors. It commemorates a 1925 event in which Alaskans relayed diphtheria serum 674 miles from Fairbanks to Nome, where an epidemic threatened the children. The race still generates donations for children's charities, Baltimore's PAL now among them.
The mushers follow frozen rivers, old freight and mail trails. They pass through 24 checkpoints, spaced 14 to 93 miles apart in remote villages and ghost towns, including Iditarod itself. They'll cross mountains, tundra and sea ice where temperatures can fall to 60 below zero.
But veteran mushers say it's not the Iditarod's obvious hazards that wreck their hopes. It's the unexpected.
In January, Dent spent 10 days practicing on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula with Iditarod veteran Tim Osmar, his dog trainer and mentor. Osmar teamed him up with 18 dogs, in the hope that the 16 dogs he'll take on the Iditarod would then seem easy.
But the power of a single husky is staggering, Dent said. "Just imagine not one, but 18 in front of you. It's a runaway train."
Stopped along the trail for reasons he can't recall, Dent and his sled were anchored by a "snow hook" -- a sort of emergency brake against the dogs' impatience. There were two more hooks on a second "whip" sled he towed to counter his team's power. Riding on the whip sled was Osmar's dog handler, Dario Daniels. As the eager dogs lunged at their harnesses, their strength suddenly overwhelmed the hooks' grip. The sled leapt forward. Dent was flipped to the ground as if a rug has been yanked from under him.
"The whip sled runs over me, with its snow hooks flipping around. And as it goes over me, it [the hook] catches the cuff of my pants, and goes right through it," he said. His leg was spared, but Dent was snagged and yanked feet first across the snow at 12 or 15 mph, a human caboose trailing two sleds and 18 charging huskies.
Saving himself meant grabbing the hook, and releasing it from his pants. "The problem is I can't bend my legs up, so I can't get my hands to the hook," he said.
Worse, the whip sled's second snow hook was flailing wildly, and soon snagged the thigh of Dent's other pant leg. Dirty Dan was "kinda like a worm on the end of a fishhook."
Alone, his prospects might have been grim. But Daniels was still aboard the whip sled. Jumping to Dent's sled, he used voice commands and the snow hooks to stop the team. Dent had bounced nearly a mile down the trail, suffering only torn pants.
More to learn
And his Alaskan education did not end there. Just days after the snow hook adventure, Dent and 12 of his dogs were racing in the 1999 Copper Basin race, a 300-mile tune-up for the Iditarod.
He finished 17th in last year's Copper Basin race, and qualified for the Iditarod. So he entered this year's race armed with Bob Seger tapes, a .44-caliber Magnum anti-moose pistol and lots of optimism.
But his troubles quickly mounted. The snow was soft and difficult for the dogs, like running on a soft beach. And, the race half over, one of his lead dogs went into heat. The continuing commotion among the males forced him to drop her at a checkpoint.
He was already cold and tired, and everything he did took too long. Then another female pulled up lame. Dent doctored the injury, but it was clear as they tried to leave the checkpoint, that she was still in pain. He dropped her.
His situation was growing critical. "I've dropped two females, and I've got a bunch of males that are pretty bummed out," Dent recalled later. Dog psychology is a vital musher's skill. "If I let them get the upper hand, it's like letting kids run wild and run all over you."
Dent tried twice to drive his 10 remaining dogs back onto the trail. But "they just don't respond." Mushers have no reins, no whips. The dogs respond to voice commands. Or they don't.
He lost 12 hours while his huskies sulked. The other teams had left. He'd slept only four hours in two days, and race officials told him to get moving in an hour or "scratch."
Alaskans scratch to protect their dogs when things go badly. There's always another race. But Dent is from Maryland. "This is my one shot. I don't want to come back to Baltimore and have my friends ask, 'How did it go?' and have to say, 'I scratched.' "
More than that, Iditarod veterans have taught him that perseverance is the key to the Iditarod -- to finishing, to surviving.
Alaskans, he said, are "constantly dealing with one adversity or another, and they just figure how to deal with it and get through it. It's the frontier mentality, and that's one of the things that's really appealing to me about it."
Urged on by Osmar, Dent fed the dogs their morning snack, and rushed to tie on their protective fleece booties -- all 40 of them. For a man of Dent's height and age, it is an agony of bending, lifting and dog-wrestling.
To his own surprise, Dent finished in an hour, and the dogs rallied. Thirty miles down the trail, they pulled into the Meier's Lake checkpoint for a snack of frozen salmon and a medical check.
More than two dozen veterinarians will staff the Iditarod checkpoints, too, examining every dog and disqualifying any that are tired, injured or sick. Critics charge the Iditarod forces dogs to run too far, too fast and nearly 30 have died since 1989. But mushers argue that's a tiny fraction of the 1,000 or so that race each year.
Dent had good running weather for the Copper Basin race -- 20 to 30 degrees below zero, with snow flurries. Alaskan huskies are comfortable running between 30-below zero and 10 or 15 above. Warmer than that -- or in sunshine -- and they heat up and dehydrate, a critical concern.
Fatigue is another. Iditarod rules say the dogs must rest 10 to 12 hours of every 24. "Rest is your best ally," Dent said, repeating a mushers' mantra. Rest for the dogs, that is, not the mushers.
Short order cook
For Dent, layovers mean firing up a gas cooker, melting down 10 loads of snow until he has three gallons of hot water going. The water provides the dogs with both badly needed fluids and warmth. Calories the dogs don't burn warming themselves are preserved for running.
While he's cooking, Dent spreads straw for bedding. Ordinarily, the huskies' down undercoats would be enough. But the straw insulation saves their calories for running.
The hot water goes into a picnic cooler, followed by dry commercial racing dog food. Drop in hunks of fat for high-octane energy. Add powdered protein and a changing mix of lamb, beef, liver, salmon and turkey skins, and stir. Dent's Iditarod bill for meat alone was $15,000.
After serving the main meal, Dent repeats the whole process preparing the dogs' breakfast, still hours away. Then there are trail snacks for the dogs, and his own rehydrated meal to fix. In all, he'll make 30 meals for the dogs at a typical six-hour layover, and one for himself. "You gotta be a short-order cook," he says. "And I'm a real Bozo in the kitchen at home."
Dent ended 20th among the 21 mushers who completed the Copper Basin race. His 98-hour time was 44 hours behind the winner, Iditarod veteran Martin Buser.
Dent figures he would have finished near the middle of the pack if he hadn't lost those 12 hours. He knows he got too little sleep, and finished weaker than in 1998. But Osmar assured him he learned much more this time.
"You're going to have adversity on the Iditarod," Osmar told him. "It will not be the same thing, but you will have to deal with it, and not panic, and figure a way through it."
"That's very Alaskan," said Dent.
Stephanie J. Komarnitsky of the Anchorage Daily News contributed to this article. Follow the race at www.iditarod.com or www.dogsled.com
Pub Date: 3/02/99