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Sidelines
Kalani Simpson
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Dogs can’t help Jonrowe this time
SHE knows more than any of us that these endurance races mean something, she knows the power they hold. She's lived it. She's felt it. She feels it just talking about it, you can hear it in her voice. You can feel the catch in her throat.
DeeDee Jonrowe has finished Alaska's famous Iditarod dogsled race more than 20 times; she's finished second in 1993, '96 and '98. Her fellow racers voted her Most Inspirational Musher twice. But she knows that these endurance races mean more than trophies and statistics and more than competition, even. No, there's something almost soulful about these events. They touch us on a human level, somewhere down deep.
Every year as they cheer her, along the front street of town, the finish line's wooden arches in sight, it hits her: This Iditarod, the "Last Great Race on Earth," commemorates that heroic moment in 1925 when "(diphtheria) serum was brought by dog teams to save the children of Nome."
"For me," she says, "it's very emotional."
And that explains it. This is why she's in Kona today, why she'll race in the Ironman Triathlon tomorrow in the Big Island's searing heat. She, a dogsled racer. An Alaskan Iditarod musher. In the Ironman, swimming, biking, 26-mile run.
On the surface it makes no sense, of course. On the surface it never does, with events like this. But DeeDee Jonrowe, who came back from a car accident (her grandmother was killed, her husband bedridden for months), who beat cancer, who overcomes Alaska's winter wilderness every year to bring her dog team down the front street of Nome, knows better than most: Sometimes, these things are bigger than just a race.
So, she's officially doing this as a breast cancer survivor, she says. Yeah, she had it. Bad. All the operations, the doubts, the fears, double mastectomy, the whole thing. There was a time when she could barely breathe.
In 2003, three and a half weeks after her last chemo treatment, she was out on the trail, in the great race, did the Iditarod again.
Her friend, Susan Butcher, "She didn't get that opportunity," Jonrowe says, "she didn't even get the opportunity to raise her two girls." Butcher, the four-time Iditarod champ, died of cancer Aug. 5. "She and I had done 18 Iditarods together."
"She would have wanted to do this," Jonrowe says.
SHE'LL BE ALONE on this one, and she's one of the best endurance racers on the planet, but she's never been out there alone.
"It's hard to put it into words," she says.
"I'm so proud of my dogs. You feel like such a single -- we think together," she says. "We're like a moving unit."
She'll be out there alone, this time, alone in the water, and the wind, and those long miles of lava fields along the highway in the Big Island's searing heat.
"I'm going to have them in my head," she says.
The dogs. "I'm very close to them. They're family," she says. When she did the Iditarod three weeks after treatment she didn't take her best athletes on the dog team. She took the ones closest to her. The ones she wanted with her. The ones who knew her best.
The ones who would see her through. And they did.
On that run she just tried to make it checkpoint to checkpoint. The way she did on her cancer comeback.
The way she will tomorrow in the Ironman, this other impossible endurance test.
They'll be in her head, every stroke, every step.
It was this last spring, so windy, so cold, she and her team were blown off the trail while headed for the Bering Sea coast.
"Had it not been for the dogs, I probably just would have sat down," she says.
Instead, she got her snowshoes, found the trail, walked the dogs over one by one. Several hours in the biting, bitter cold.
This event? Now? She can do this.
"I know how to put my head down for nine days," she says.
The Ironman can feel like nine days.
The swim, she says. She doesn't know what she's doing, tried to practice in Alaska's cold lakes, but that didn't work. There's a time limit on each phase, in the Ironman, and if you don't meet it they throw you out of the race. She knows she can just keep putting one foot in front of the other if she can just make it out of the sea.
She'll be alone, this time, without the team that had pulled her through so many times before.
"If I could just have a couple of them in the hotel room," she says.
THIS IS SERIOUS business, this Ironman -- DeeDee Jonrowe, the Iditarod musher, knows this most of all. This isn't amateur hour -- these ultimate endurance races aren't for anyone who just decides to show up.
The Ironman certainly isn't. You have to qualify, and Jonrowe hasn't.
She knows it. On her home taiga/tundra turf, "I would not be impressed, if someone had bypassed the rules and just come in."
And so she more than anyone knows how serious this is, how hard she needed to train, what it means to do something like this. She, more than anyone, knows how truly tough this would be.
"I've tried to be a student of the Ironman, not just an entry," she says.
"I spent 25 years digging deep for that extra level," she says.
Oh, her being asked, being whisked to the front of the line as a celebrity entrant, it's a publicity stunt. It's a storyline for the broadcast on NBC. She knows it. She's doing it anyway.
They'd asked several of the top Iditarod mushers before her, she says. "There weren't a lot of takers." She was the one who said yes. She had a reason to do it.
She knows the power these races hold.
And so she's doing this. An Iditarod dogsledder in the Ironman, in the water, on the road, baking in the lava fields in the Big Island's searing heat ("just another stressor," she says, "I've learned how to deal with cold").
Tomorrow she'll be in the Ironman. No dogs, no team. Alone.
But she won't be, really. This explains it, even if on the surface it makes no sense. She'll be swimming, biking, running for her friend, Susan Butcher. For cancer patients.
She knows more than any of us that these endurance races mean something -- she knows the power they hold. She's lived it. She's felt it. She feels it just talking about it; you can hear it in her voice. You can feel the catch in her throat.
She knows these things touch us on a human level, somewhere, down deep.
She might fail. She knows that, too, that's part of it. She didn't finish an Iditarod one year when her dogs could go no more. This isn't her event. This isn't Alaska. Yes, she might fail.
"My faith plays a big part in being able to take chances," she says.
And so she's doing it. She's in the Ironman. These events mean something. She knows that more than any of us, having tested the limits of endurance so many times, having made that emotional run through the finish line more than 20 times before.
When she got her last Most Inspirational Musher award, she said, "If what I'm doing doesn't make a difference in someone else's life, it's a waste of time."
What she's doing is coming in with her dog team, to save the children of Nome.