Leaving Safety Behind - the story

Leaving Safety Behind - the story

Last year, when my kids were 6, 4, and 2, I decided to become an Ultimate Insider at the Iditarod website. It only cost a little money and according to the pundits the dollars in my account would soon be worthless, so it seemed logical to trade a little bit of "nothing" for an Ultimate of anything.

The Iditarod is addictive - once you start watching the Run Dog Run videos, and once you pick a few teams to cheer for, and once you realize that for a week in early March, almost 1000 dogs run about 1000 miles just because the mushers are willing to let them, and stay with them while they do, it's just plain addictive.

If you spend even a little time getting into it, you'll come across the name of last year's 2nd place finisher, Aliy Zirkle. An extremely charismatic musher, Aliy quickly became my children's favorite musher. They wrote cards to her (although they didn't get sent) and we cheered her along, and we really really hoped she would find the speed to catch up to, and pass, Mitch Seavey last year.

We wanted it, not because we had anything against Mitch Seavey. Mitch is a man who, from what I can tell from watching interviews and reading his profile, deserves to win the Iditarod as much as anyone. Truth be told, I probably have more in common with Mitch Seavey than Aliy Zirkle, but at the start of the race, watching a video with Ms. Zirkle in it, my kids fell in love with her and we cheered for her the whole way.

Part of why we cheered for her is that in 2012, she had narrowly lost to Dallas Seavey, Mitch's son. In an 8-day race over 1000 miles, where you are only required to stop and rest for a total of 40 hours over the whole course, she had lost - or, if you prefer, not won - by a mere 59 minutes and 44 seconds. It would have been great - GREAT! - for her to come back the next year, presumably apply all she had learned, and then win the 2013 race.

Instead, in 2013 she raced well, and despite that Mitch Seavey won his second championship by 24 minutes and 39 seconds, over Aliy Zirkle. She'd closed the gap in the final stretch by a minute, but it wasn't enough. Second place, two years in a row. (She was 11th in 2011.)

2012 - second place by 59 minutes and 40 seconds. 2013 - second place by 24 minutes and 39 seconds. Surely this would be her year?

And so for the 2014 Iditarod we ponied up the money to be an Ultimate Insider again, watching videos of dogs running across the tundra when we were supposed to be getting ready for bed. Learning about Alaska, reading about the training and care and breeding of the dogs. Watching the GPS tracker and refreshing it before the 5 minute automatic refresh, because, even though they are only moving 10 mph or so, when you see the markers moving along the trail, and you realize your racer is gaining or losing ground or - heaven forbid! - passing a former champion! It's intoxicating. [Kudos - MAJOR kudos - to the Iditarod team for putting together a great race and website.]

Each racer has a strategy, there are very specific rules, and it gets pretty complicated, as you might imagine, running 16 dogs across frozen ground for 8 days straight. Suffice it to say that in a good year, the race is still pretty heated when the mushers and dogs get to the final 77 miles, from a checkpoint on the coast of Norton Sound called White Mountain, where they are required to stop and rest for 8 hours, until they finish at Nome Alaska. We anticipated a close finish and began to see the 4 time champion Jeff King putting to an end our hopes of an Aliy Zirkle win when his dogs just plain out-ran her dogs to the White Mountain checkpoint.

He rested the required 8 hours, and left for the final check point before the finish line. According to people on the scene, the wind was blowing 65 knots, the path was extremely icy, and Jeff King was literally blown off the trail and into some driftwood. I'm still waiting to hear if he was using a brand-new sled that he'd had shipped to the White Mountain checkpoint (presumably) just for the final sprint, but whether that's true or not, the sled was stuck in the wood.  After an hour of trying to extricate it, Jeff King scratched. I can only imagine how that must feel, and how hard he must have worked to get that sled out of the driftwood, but there is only so much a person do. (My hat is off to you, Jeff King, for racing like a champion right up until Mother Nature pushed you off the trail. Readers should be aware that if a racer accepts any help at all, even help with feeding the dogs, then they are disqualified.)

Apparently Aliy Zirkle arrived at Safety - which is the last checkpoint before the finish line - without realizing she had passed Jeff King in the dark of night. She would have known she had left White Mountain almost an hour behind him. She arrived, instead of losing time to him as she had in the previous legs, ahead of him. In fact, she would have learned that he was out of the race. She was in first place. She would also have known that the next competitor would have been Dallas Seavey, who had arrived at White Mountain an hour and 48 minutes after her, and thus would leave White Mountain (after the required 8 hours of 'rest') no less than one hour and 47 minutes behind her. (Aliy Zirkle stayed one extra minute in White Mountain.)

And further, with the information that seems to be available to them, and was certainly available to me, she would have also known that Dallas Seavey had taken the same amount of time to travel to White Mountain from the previous checkpoint in Elim, well, within 2 minutes. He was traveling virtually the same speed. He was almost 2 hours behind. She was in Safety, knowing that the wind was so strong that it had blown a 4-time Iditarod champion off the trail... It's possible (but not certain to me) that she would know that Dallas Seavey was making the trek from White Mountain to Safety more slowly than she had. In fact, he left White Mountain 1 hour 48 minutes behind her, but arrived at Safety 2 hours and 16 minutes behind her.

I would love to know the details of what happened at Safety. I would love to know if Aliy Zirkle was asleep when Dallas Seavey arrived, if she was exhausted, if she was convinced no one would be foolish enough to go out into the wind, if her team was so strong it wouldn't matter what anyone else did... I do not know what she was thinking, in the middle of the night, 20 miles from the finish, after 8 days of racing.

What I do know is that Dallas Seavey arrived 2 hours and 16 minutes after she did, but left 19 minutes before she did. Dallas Seavey pulled into Safety and would have been told he was in second place, and that Aliy Zirkle was still in Safety. They may have talked. They may have looked each other in the eye, or maybe he slowed down just enough to prove to the inspector that he had the required items packed with him and for the vets to check his dogs, and 3 minutes after his arrival he departed Safety.

19 minutes later, Aliy Zirkle left Safety, Alaska, and raced faster than she had mushed those dogs in the past 3 days, and over the next 20 miles she made up 17 minutes on Dallas Seavey. She left Safety 19 minutes behind him, and arrived in Nome Alaska 2 minutes behind the 2014 Iditarod Champion, Dallas Seavey.

I woke up this morning just a couple of minutes after the live finish. (Last year it was at 2 AM my time!) I had hoped that Aliy Zirkle would win, for many reasons. I have two little girls that need role models that aren't entertainers. I'm much closer in age to Aliy Zirkle than to Dallas Seavey, and it would have been great for the Generation X racer to beat the younger racer. She'd run a great race, she'd really earned the win.

I can't really blame her for not leaving Safety behind. I think I'll remember this story forever, though, because the way Dallas Seavey won this year appears to be a lesson for life, especially when you think about the fact that he literally had to leave Safety behind, going back out into the dark, cold night to coax another 2 hours and 48 minutes of running out of those dogs.

If I could ask Aliy Zirkle one question, it would be, "what did your gut tell you to do when you were there in safety (in Safety, Alaska), before Dallas arrived?"

As a surgeon I've come to understand that sometimes you have to trust your gut. You have to make a decision that might not come down to championships or 2nd place, and it doesn't always come down to life and death, thankfully! As an investor I can't say that I always properly hedge, sometimes I leave safety out of the equation entirely. I try to trust my gut, and I'm getting better at that. I'm going to spend a bit of time processing this one - is the lesson here to throw caution to the wind and get back out on the trail? Is second place in the Iditarod such a bad thing? It's pretty impressive that she's done it three years in a row now - my Buffalo Bills fan brother points out they lost the SuperBowl 4 years in a row - no other team went to the SuperBowl four years in a row! You could argue that Aliy Zirkle is the best racer out there over the last 3 years.

And you could argue that if she'd left Safety 3 minutes earlier, she would have won. That assumes that Dallas Seavey wouldn't have squeezed a little more speed out of his dogs at the finish, rather than letting her overtake him. Iditarod has seen that before - that's why the rules clearly state that the nose of the lead dog determines the winner. Dallas Seavey jumped off his sled and RAN along next to it at the end, after coming back from 24th place earlier in the race! He is clearly a worthy champion, and perhaps the lesson here should be that the future may not be as uncertain as we are led to believe by the doom-and-gloom folks among us? Maybe the next generation is ready to do some hard work, after all?

In the context of Hedging Life, I think the lesson has to be, at least at first blush: Finish. Never Give Up. Dallas Seavey must have thought he was too far behind, he was just too far behind, as he left White Mountain. Imagine the spark that raced across his mind when he arrived in Safety and realized, if I just leave Safety, I might be the champion? Finish. Leave Safety behind, and finish. Whatever it is that you are waiting for, it's not in Safety. It's out in the dark, with the wind blowing hard in your face, and the trail uncertain, and someone younger and stronger than you coming along to make the trade if you don't. Take a minute, and look at your portfolio, and decide if you need more or less safety. Trust your gut.