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.”
Take it from Iten: Feeding a dog team in races such as the Iditarod, Yukon Quest or Kobuk 440 is more art than science, and even the best dog drivers don’t have it tuned to perfection. Methods of getting calories into sled dogs vary as drastically as the dog’s personalities and the various bloodlines that emerge from each kennel. Everyone has a unique system, but the basics of feeding revolve around high-calorie, high-quality commercial food supplemented with fats.
Like just about everything in this relatively young sport of distance sled dog racing - the gear, the strategies and, to some extent, the dogs themselves - the art of feeding is an ever-changing process. Its evolution can be seen looking back at the short history of the Iditarod. In the mid-1970s, mushers relied on kibble from the grocery store, which had to be supplemented heavily with raw meat. Through trial and error, many shifted their dogs to a diet more reliant on frozen meat and fat, since commercial food couldn’t meet the demands of their athletes. They would soak the dog food in a warm slurry of thawed meat, fish and fat, serving up steaming, gloopy stews to their dogs. But in the last few years, dog food manufacturers have unveiled “ultra” quality kibble that many mushers, including 2006 champion Jeff King, swear will power their teams from start to finish, supplemented just a little with fats for a calorie boost.
Most competitive dog drivers now rely primarily on high-octane dry dog foods such as Eagle Ultra, Caribou Creek or other high-protein, high-fat kibbles. Those provide the bulk of the calories during races. Mushers supplement that diet with fats such as lamb, chicken skins or turkey skins, depending on how cold it is. And, while this seems obvious, most competitive mushers – but not all – still do the bulk of their feeding at checkpoints or during long campouts on the trail. When they push on long runs of more than four hours, most stoke their dogs with snacks, typically moistened kibble dolloped onto the snow or chunks of fatty meat.
“Jeff (King) and I both feed the highest-test super premiums we can find, and they’re making up a large part of our diet,” said Doug Swingley, the four-time Iditarod champion who jockeyed with King for about a week before finishing second in the 2006 Iditarod. He guessed that dry food made up 75 percent of his dogs’ race diet. “I think that’s the only way we can possibly get enough calories into them to maintain any weight at all,” he said.
Some mushers, such as Martin Buser, feed straight kibble. Buser is one of the few that feeds it in utter simplicity: dry on the ground with a separate bowl of water. Others mix water and kibble and feed it immediately, so the dogs get something like a bowl of crunchy cereal.
Acknowledging he’s still “old school,” Swingley takes it one step further, adding meat to the water. “I’m feeding 16 pounds of dry food mixed in with 4 to 8 pounds of meat. Calorie-wise, that 16 pounds is around 2,700 to 2,800 calories per pound,” he said.
The meat is mainly for palatability’s sake, he said. His team, in 2006 at least, just wasn’t interested in eating dry food by itself.
A good starting point
Swingley’s numbers are a good starting point for anyone packing for a distance race and trying to figure out just how much kibble to send for each planned feeding. It is easy to weigh out a pound of food per dog, assuming it is high-grade food. But quantities still vary from dog to dog; some seem to always need a super-size meal, while others gain weight just by getting a whiff of the cooler as it passes by.
It’s been proven that sled dogs burn up to 10,000 calories a day during a distance race, so the dogs would easily fill their tanks with four 1-pound feedings a day of foods such as Eagle Ultra, Caribou Creek, Blackwood 7000, Red Paw, Momentum or Royal Canin’s high-test product used by Swingley.
But that brings up another stumper. Since most distance mushers are running a minimum of six hours at a time and resting about as long, it seems there would only be a couple of feedings a day. The remainder of feedings are massaged into the day in two ways: First, the dogs generally get an additional feeding during a break of five hours or more; second, they often get smaller meals, or “snacks,” while they’re on the run.
Buser, a four-time Iditarod champ, says he feeds his team once right when they pull in for a longer rest, and again just before he hooks them up to go. That defies conventional wisdom about exercising on a full stomach, but sled dogs have an uncanny knack for defying conventional wisdom.
“Typically I arrive, locate water immediately and let the dogs hydrate; they’re trained to drink on arrival,” Buser said. After an initial feeding of dry Ultra, he tops it off with a fat snack, either sliced turkey skins or thin patties of lamb fat. “That’s pretty much repeated every six hours whether they need it or not. It gets two feedings into the dogs in a six-hour rest,” he said. “I often will run 60 to 70 miles without giving them anything. Maybe it just works for me, but it doesn’t seem like they overeat. They seem to be able to eat and run.”
‘It works for me’
Buser said the phrase commonly heard from mushers talking about their feeding habits: “It works for me.” Everybody does something a little different, and those musher-specific patterns are formed well before a race.
Feeding sled dogs on a race trail is the culmination of a wordless dialog between musher and team that begins months beforehand. It’s an intertwining give and take between human and canine. Some dogs respond well to Buser’s training regimen of simply laying out a bowl of water and a pile of dry kibble. Others learn to eat best when the meal is a stewlike mixture of kibble, meat, fat and water. One way isn’t necessarily better than the other, so long as the dogs are sucking up the nutrition.
Lance Mackey keeps his program pretty basic, and it’s tough to argue with a guy who wins races as often as he does. He feeds mostly commercial food at checkpoints and largely limits his trail snacks to chunks of lamb tossed to his dogs. “I snack every three hours no matter what, to the minute,” he said. “Normally fatty stuff. A lot of people try to put water snacks into their dogs. I let mine dip for the most part. I feed a lot of fat because you can’t run ‘em skinny.”
One caveat that all of these mushers mention when talking about supplementing with fat is that it is weather-dependent. If the day is calm, sunny and warm, they will snack with just about anything besides fat; if it is 40 below, they’ll snack more often and desperately search their sled bags for more fat.
Snacking on the trail
That brings up the fine art of “snacking.” It seems every distance musher has a different approach, but it is tough nailing down the facts. Much of what they do is kept somewhat close to the vest, and there’s the sneaking suspicion among some of them that the other guy may not be doing what he says he is.
Generally, most competitive dog drivers say they give their dogs a feeding on the trail if they’re traveling over six hours.
“If the run is longer than seven hours, I’m feeding in the middle,” Swingley said. “If it’s less, then it’s an option. Say I’m going from Nikolai to Takotna, I’ll leave Nikolai with food in my cooler, but whether I use it depends on the speed of the trail. There are years when I’ve made it to McGrath in four and a half hours. I’m not going to stop and feed if it’s going to take six and a half hours to get to Takotna.”
Generally speaking, mushers don’t snack too soon after leaving a checkpoint or campout, since they figure they’re starting off with the fuel gauge pretty close to the full mark.
“On an eight-hour run, I don’t snack before four hours,” Iten said. “I used to do it every two to three hours. Anymore, I will dipper out of the cooler at four hours and run ‘em in to a checkpoint. I carry fish, but I pretty much give them commercial if they take it because I figure there’s more energy in that.”
A word of caution to aspiring mushers who like the sound of Iten’s trail snacking routine: What Iten, or any other musher, does on the trail is intimately connected to how he feeds at checkpoints. Iten’s dogs eat extremely well at checkpoints, so he loads them up with food there, and there isn’t much need for him to snack on the trail. Dogs that nibble during long breaks may need extra snacking on the run.
One interesting example of that is King, who said his dogs increasingly are relying on checkpoints, as places to sleep, not eat. They seem to eat better on the trail, he said, speculating that the shift toward running longer – eight to 12 hours at a time – is creating that pattern.
“In Iditarod, I was feeding a larger portion of their daily calories somewhere on the trail than at the checkpoint,” he said. “I’d carry a really huge volume of food out of checkpoint, and get started feeding more quickly, and the dogs seemed more awake and their appetites seemed a little keener. In some cases, I hardly fed at all. At Koyuk this year, I just gave ‘em water and kibble.”
King’s version of a trail snack is lightly soaked Caribou Creek dog food packed in the cooler that he somehow wedges in the front section of his tiny tail-dragger sled. “It’s wet but not watery,” King said. One of the challenges when soaking out dog food is avoiding turning it into a slurry, which can transform even the best dog food into garbage, King said. “Typically I soak the dog food before I leave, then turn the cooler upside down and let it drain.” He doesn’t want any water to pour out of the food when he dollops it onto the snow for his dogs to eat.
Hydrating the dogs
The traditional practice of soaking commercial dog food for hours until it is the consistency of pudding doesn’t work well with the newer, high-octane feeds.
The dogs will get hydrated if they’re thirsty, and they can learn to drink plain water quite easily. I gave my dogs plain water at least once at every stop in the 2005 Yukon Quest. It was a chore because I was constantly melting snow in the middle of nowhere, but at least it gave me something to do. And they lapped it up. “The dogs will regulate themselves by drinking fresh, clean water or dipping snow,” said Al Townshend, staff veterinarian for Eagle Pack Pet Foods and a volunteer veterinarian on the Iditarod trail.
Dipping – the way dogs lunge out and bite a mouthful of snow along the trail while moving – is historically frowned upon, but it isn’t always a bad thing in a long-distance race. In fact, it’s a pretty convenient way to get water into the dogs, since dipping takes no effort on the musher’s part. King is thrilled with dipping, which is easier for his dogs because he runs them without necklines.
He once counted the number of times his string of 16 dogs dipped for snow during a training run. A dog would take a mouthful of snow every 10 seconds. That’s more than 300 mouthfuls of snow per hour, and more than 4,000 in 12 hours of running. “Thousands of tablespoons of snow in my cooker is like several gallons of water,” he said. “It’s like a drip irrigation system.”
The original hybrid fuel system
While mushers do their best to give their dogs plenty of food and water during a 300-, 440- or 1,000-mile marathon, everything they do is based on their best guesswork and experience. Not much is known about how sled dogs are able to run so long, rest a while and do it all over again. Obviously, getting proper food and water into them is a big part of it.
Researchers are just now trying to figure out exactly how sled dogs can eat and run so well. The answer seems to be that dogs can do something humans can’t. People rely on glycogen to fuel their muscles. Once the carbohydrate-based glycogen runs out, humans shut down until they build their supply back up. Sled dogs seem to have a neat internal trick. They can switch their body chemistry to an entirely new fuel system, kind of like a hybrid car mixes gasoline and electricity, according to Mike Davis, an associate professor of veterinary physiology at Oklahoma State University. Davis is trying to unlock that secret.
He figures a sled dog switches from glycogen-based energy to fat-based energy maybe 200 to 300 miles into a race; and they can juggle the carbohydrate- and fat-based fuel systems all the way down the trail. They have a way of pulling nutrients right out of the fat stored in their body, he believes. And that allows the dogs to continue day after day.
Back on the trail where the paws hit the snow, the finer points of fueling dogs for the long haul remains a big guessing game, even to top mushers.
Iten’s reason for musing over the mystery of feeding was sparked by something he saw as he left checkpoints. His dogs made the biggest trail deposits of any team around, while those ahead of him left the trail looking a lot less brown. “I have to be careful I don’t overfeed them,” Iten said. “Watching other mushers, I swear I’m feeding twice the feed of Jeff and Martin.”