NOME — As if one race down Front Street in the top 10 wasn’t historic enough, fans witnessed a second race to the finish line Wednesday, this one between Sebastian Schnuelle and Zack Steer.

The two had traveled together since Elim and decided that whoever got to Front Street first would wait for the second, and they would sprint to the finish, which is about half a mile. Schnuelle, the steady moving musher from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, was the first up on the road. He waited and said “Let’s go!” when Steer pulled up close.

Schnuelle wound up first in the chute anyway. “He got me, my dogs made a wrong turn,” Steer said after the footrace, which was a lot less stressful than the pitched battle between Ken Anderson and Martin Buser for fourth and fifth earlier in the day. Still, it was a race for a spot in the top 10, which is always an honor.

Schnuelle is from the slow and steady distance racing school of thought. He ran slow for the first half of the Iditarod, cruising the team for hours and hours before parking. At some point, his team either sped up, or simply maintained its steady pace while the others slowed down. He had 14 dogs in harness at the end of the race, only the second musher behind Jeff King to have that many dogs in his team the whole way.

Cim Smyth posts fastest time to Nome, so far
Cim Smyth usually makes the 22-mile run from Safety to Nome in about two hours, roughly 10 miles an hour, and 2008 was no different. Smyth’s team of nine dogs did it in two hour and 11 minutes, but his mission wasn’t so much the Nome Kennel Club fastest to Nome award, but sheer old-fashioned racing. He could just about smell the teams ahead of him and hoped he could reel them in. “Oh, I was trying to catch these guys and we ust didn’t make it,” Smyth said as he ran up to pet his leaders.

Smyth fell about nine minutes shy of Steer and Schnuelle. He was fastest among the top 13 teams, but the fastest Safety-to-Nome award is given to the fastest in the top 20. More teams were coming.

Smyth, who made a little news last year when he donned sneakers in pretty cold weather for the long haul from White Mountain to Nome. He said then that he’d intended to run a lot to gain time on the last leg. The sneakers would assure that he did, because he’d freeze if he didn’t keep moving.

This year, Smyth wore military surplus mukluks towards the end of the race. The zippers on the canvas boots worke when the race started, but failed at some point. At every checkpoint, Smyth went hunting for duct tape to wrap around the legs of his mukluks, lacing them tight around his leg.