Norway win suggests another strong Iditarod for Robert Sørlie
KASILOF, Alaska — Two-time Iditarod champion Robert Sørlie should be a force to reckon with this year, judging by his recent victory in a tough 373-mile race in Norway. Sørlie and his team of powerful, evenly matched dogs are in peak shape.
Sørlie – one of the most influential Iditarod mushers this decade – is poised to make a bid for his third Iditarod victory in four attempts. That puts him in rare company. Maybe one other multiple winner, Rick Swenson, can claim such a rapid rise to success. Sørlie deliberately set a moderate pace as a rookie in 2002 and finished ninth, then won the next two races. If anyone can win in three out of four, it is Sørlie, who has all the gifts of a champion, which include stamina, focus, good humor in bad situations and the ability to inspire dogs to perform their best.
He last raced in 2005, then took a year off so his nephew, Bjornar Andersen, could drive some of Norway’s best sled dogs in the Iditarod. Andersen finished sixth, maintaining a steady top-10 status for Team Norway, a collaboration of three mushers that includes Sørlie, Andersen and Kjetil Backen. Sørlie wasn’t absent from the 2006 race, however. He still traveled up the trail, by airplane, watching, studying and analyzing as the event unfolded from checkpoint to checkpoint.
In the days leading up to his late February departure for Alaska, Sørlie piloted a unified team, rolling from behind to win the challenging Femund, a 600-kilometer (373-mile) sled dog race that starts and finishes in Roros, Norway. He’d been in second or third place throughout the race, only surging into the lead after 300 miles.
Sørlie was third, 15 minutes behind the leader with 71 miles to go. But 15 miles later, at the next to last checkpoint, he had passed the front two teams and was eight minutes ahead of his nearest competitor. By the finish, he had amassed a 35-minute lead.
“My plan was to ‘be there’ among the best, but still to complete a controlled race,” Sørlie wrote in an e-mail interview a couple of weeks after completing the Femund 600. He said he avoided calling his dogs up to run faster, except in a few key locations where he felt he had to do it. “This worked perfect during the race,” he said.
He uses the term “extras” to describe calling the dogs to run a little harder. “I began to ask the dogs for shallow extras at (inbound checkpoint) Grimsbu, down the valley of Folldal (about 200 miles into the race). I did that to see if there was any power in the team – if there was anything to ask for and if they could do it when asked,” he said. “So, even though this may look like a ‘push’ on the race updates, it was more of a check on the status of the team and their abilities/potential. They proved themselves qualified.”
“The F-600 didn’t serve me any surprises. It was a 100-percent controlled completion where I got the answers I needed. If I would have to mention a sort of surprise, it would have to be Bruno, a dog that proved himself to be even better than I thought. He convinced me and surprised me in a very positive way. I got also sort of surprised when I headed for Røros (the finish line). It came to my mind that, ‘Gee, this is in fact the first time ever I’m getting to Røros with a team that is fully up and seemingly not exhausted at all’ … that is very positive! I’m very glad about that.”
More impressive than his surge to win, Sørlie completed the race without dropping any of his 12 dogs, which says something about the team’s caliber, and backs up Sørlie’s observation that he’s running a freight train this year. Every one of them runs in lead.
“These dogs have really impressed me. I can’t right away remember the last time I had my hands on such a good team,” Sørlie told the Web master from the Team Norway Web site.
Sørlie explained that he’s had great teams in the past, notable for some standout leaders with excellent team dogs running support. But his 2007 squad is different in that there aren’t the superstar leaders this time around, unless one emerges during the Iditarod. Instead, his team seems to operate as a unit.
“I have a team of equally good dogs. It’s very hard to pick out or point at one dog and claim him to be better than the others,” he said.
Asked to do so anyway, he singled out three of his key dogs: Dixie, a 6-year-old female, Rolex, a 5-year-old male, and another male, Boggi, 8. All three have run the Iditarod twice.
“The strength of the team is that it can keep a very steady pace but still run fast when I ask them to do so,” Sørlie said. “Besides this, it is able to cope and deal with tough weather and trail conditions when that occurs.” The team is a “floating” team, he said, which is a way of saying it is steady and able to keep its footing on hard, soft or icy trail conditions.
“I believe I have many strong dogs to lean on, so there won’t be any dangerous drama when dogs are being dropped in the Iditarod. All dogs seem to be equally good and equally able to fill any positions in the team. But, indeed, I do miss dogs like Kvitsokk (Whitesock), Blue and Sox. Those were really dependable dogs that acted really responsible when things got really tough.”
In addition to changing his team chemistry in 2007, Sørlie, 49, took it upon himself to improve his physical fitness this year. He has always been fit, but he worked out a little more in the offseason. His goal isn’t so much to improve his speed down the trail – no musher can keep pace with a dog team – it was done to keep him sharper and better able to care for his athletes. “It has something to do with your mental health, strength and ability to stay focused during the long races,” he said. It should also give him confidence when he does “dig deep” from behind the sled in tough stretches of trail.
There are a handful of mushers whose mere presence in the Iditarod forces a change in the way others run the race – names like Butcher, Swenson, Buser and King come to mind. Sørlie is another example. His, and Team Norway’s, patient and disciplined racing style that relies on an aggressive conditioning program to steady the dogs’ speed has changed the way many others run the race. Jeff King, for example, folded some of Team Norway’s strategies into his program last year, running his changed game plan to perfection and winning with an exuberant dog team.
“I guess I’ve made people work harder and train harder to be able to race longer?” Sørlie said about his influence. “People may believe that’s the key to success. I may have had influence in that context.”
Early in a race, he said he lets the dogs run at their own pace. Of course, he’s put roughly 3,000 miles of training on his dogs by that point, so “their” pace is something slower than they are physically capable of running. Mentally, his dogs have learned what every distance runner knows, that moderation is the key to success in long-distance racing. “I do keep an eye at the speed, slowing down when I think they’re moving on too fast,” he said. “In fact, I’ve not taught them anything at all; it’s the training that makes them move at the different speeds. This was what I did in the F-600 this year, too. I didn’t make any strong pushes by asking them for great extras – they moved on with their own, natural, desired pace – but, of course, I do calm them down when I think the situation isn’t serving the right conditions for the current speed. The speed is always dictated by the conditions and trail quality.”
“Myself, I’m still doing everything the same way as I’ve always done it. That’s the stuff that works for me. So, there hasn’t been much change this year compared to 2002, 2003 and 2005. It may of course be true that others have changed their way of doing things? I’m doing my things my way. I gotta stay focused on my job and avoid getting disturbed by others.”
Like a freight train, Sørlie appears to be already on track, gathering steam. His mission is to keep that train on the rails while keeping an eye out for some of the other locomotives and bullet trains in this year’s race.