Date: July 26, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Butcher battles marrow rejection
KASILOF, Alaska — Susan Butcher’s long road to recovery from leukemia has hit a roadblock, forcing the weakened, four-time Iditarod champion into a fierce, secondary battle if she is to once again assume her role as mother to daughters Tekla and Chisana.
Butcher’s toughness and resolve is legendary. But this time, it isn’t fierce winds and cold on the home stretch to Nome, nor is she battling the slopes of Mt. McKinley. According to the Web diary of her husband, David Monson, Butcher is fighting to hold down food and to be able to move her limbs as she lies in a bed at a Seattle hospital famed for its cancer treatment. An article by Jeff Richardson that ran July 23 in Butcher’s hometown newspaper, the “Fairbanks Daily News-Miner,” summed up her fight within a fight. The battle now is with Graft Versus Host Disease:
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Date: July 20, 2006 at 4:39 pm
DeNure trains for rookie Iditarod run
KASILOF, Alaska — Some people toil with their dogs in obscurity for years before becoming a palpable part of the distance mushing community, while others seemingly have a gift of showing up and effortlessly emerging as a fixture, a mover and a shaker. Zoya DeNure is one such musher.
Since the former runway model and music promoter’s first introduction to sled dogs back in Wisconsin six years ago, DeNure has moved to Alaska, found herself in a relationship with one of the most respected distance drivers in the state, established a women’s race on her home trails near Paxson and, now, stands at the cusp of running her first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. DeNure, 29, and her partner, John Schandelmeier, have carved a niche in the sport by rescuing rejects – Alaskan huskies from the animal shelter – and turning them into competitive athletes. She finished the 2006 Chantanika 200 in second place and has competed in several mid-distance races, placing in the top five of the field over the past three years.
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Date: July 20, 2006 at 12:52 pm
KASILOF, Alaska – Dodo Perri, 48, a longtime musher in Italy and veteran of the 2005 Iditarod, died July 14 in a diving accident in the Isle of Ponza harbor in the Tirrenean Sea near Rome. Perri was living on the Isle of Ponza with his girlfriend, Maria Rita Menichelli, who owns a store there. He was a part-time fisherman, and on Friday afternoon, he was busy trying to recover a lure made to look like a colorful metal fish. It’s used for catching cattle fish. He had lost the lure the evening before while returning to dock his boat. While diving to get the lure, he hit his head on a boat propeller, which caused massive head injuries. A boat driver got him out of the water almost immediately and administered first aid, but he was too badly injured to survive.
Perri was a veteran of sled dog sports, having won the Italian Sled Dog Championship and run in eight Alpirods, an international sled dog race that spanned Italian, French and Austrian Alps. And he had fought tooth and nail to raise money to run his first Iditarod. Finishing 52nd, Perri described his rookie Iditarod as “good,” despite wallowing through deep snow, ruts and open water that plagued the race that year. “The whole thing, I like,” he said, describing the run with a mountaineer’s language as “very technical up to Rohn.”
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Date: July 11, 2006 at 12:58 pm
KASILOF, Alaska – Ed Iten barely had a chance to nap after his third major race of the winter, and he was in a reflective mood. His voice thick with sleep, he ruminated on the season gone by. Having compiled close to 2,000 miles in races alone in 2006, he still scratched his head over one of the fundamentals of the sport: his feeding routine.
“Y’know, I’m still trying to figure that out,” he said groggily just after finishing second by 16 minutes to a blazing-hot Lance Mackey in this year’s Kobuk 440. “Some mushers are pretty comfortable with it, but if I’m dealing with anything, it’s the mystery of feeding.”
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