When 29-year-old Farmington Hills native Samantha LaLonde was nearing the finish line of this year’s Iditarod — in Nome, in the wee hours of Sunday, March 16 — her dogs seemed to want to celebrate her Rookie of the Year run a little early.
“At the end, you can see the burled arch, and they have these beautiful Christmas lights hanging up,” said Lalonde. “But before you reach that, you have to go down the road, and there are bars lining the road. … It was pretty icy, and the dogs were looking to find snow, so they were veering off the road. … There was a crowd standing outside of a bar, and (the dogs) just kind of beelined it toward those guys. I joked at the finish line, ‘The dogs just want to go straight to the bar.’”
You could hardly blame them. Though the Iditarod is always a test of endurance — covering one thousand miles of Alaska’s rugged terrain — more than 100 miles were added to its route this year thanks to a lack of snow that pushed the race’s starting location from Willow, near Anchorage, to Fairbanks.
The shift made this year’s Iditarod the longest ever, and LaLonde sprained her ankle along the way, but she still managed to run it in 12 days, 14 hours, 20 minutes, and 56 seconds. (This year’s Iditarod champion, reality TV star Jessie Holmes, finished in ten days, fourteen hours, 55 minutes, and 41 seconds.)
“I had a schedule (written out beforehand) that made those extra hundred miles pretty easy on all of us,” said LaLonde. “Obviously it will change depending on the conditions, the weather, and all of that. But I tried to follow it pretty closely. … I think that’s what really helped us in the end. … We banked a lot of rest, knowing that we had extra mileage.”
Perhaps surprisingly, LaLonde considered the race’s earliest days the most challenging.
“A race judge at the beginning told me that I’m going to have a lot of very low moments, where I won’t know if I can make it through, but that they’ll come and go,” LaLonde said, noting the sense of overwhelm that came while “telling myself, OK, we have 700 more miles to go. … But once I got about 700 miles in, once I reached the coast, … that’s where I was like, ‘Oh, this is really fun.’ I started enjoying it a lot more.”
Another mental obstacle simply involved confidence. “I feel like I put too much pressure on myself to make sure the dogs were just perfect,” LaLonde said. “So, a lot of what I learned, on the mental side of things, is (realizing), you know exactly what you’re doing. … You’ve been training for six years to be where you’re at right now.”
LaLonde, who graduated from Farmington Hills’ Harrison High School in 2013, was first introduced to the sport during her freshman year at Northern Michigan University, when she worked as a volunteer for the UP 200 dog sled race in Marquette. (She earned her NMU degree in Outdoor Recreation Leadership and Management in 2017.) She loved the energy surrounding the event, but she didn’t “lock in” on becoming a musher herself until she started landing jobs where she cared for and trained race dogs.
And dog care is a huge part of the process. “You have to complete 750 miles worth of races to qualify (for the Iditarod), and you don’t have to finish in the top three or anything, you just have to finish in good standing,” said LaLonde. “So, they look at your dog care — that’s the most important one — and wilderness survival skills. … (Dog care) was the most important thing for me, because a thousand miles is a long way. … So, it comes down to regularly checking out … the dogs’ feet and making sure everybody has nice, dry booties on, because small things like having a wet bootie can really affect the dog.”
LaLonde was the 15th musher across the Iditarod finish line this year, from a starting field of 33. (Only 22 completed the race, the lowest number since the race’s inception in 1973.)
“The coolest part was coming down the road in Nome and seeing the family and friends that have seen me through the last six years of my training, especially my mom and dad, because they still live in Michigan,” LaLonde said. “Since I’ve been training so much, I haven’t gotten to see them as much as any of us would like. So, seeing them at the finish line was a cool, full circle moment. It was like, ‘Hey, this is why I haven’t been around too much.’”
Because LaLonde was the highest-ranking first timer to finish, she earned the Iditarod’s Rookie of the Year Award. Then she “slept for three days straight” and made sure the also-rookie young dogs on her team — all but one of which hail from six-time Iditarod champion Dallas Seavey’s kennel in Talkeetna, Alaska, where LaLonde trained — were healthy and healing.
LaLonde’s next adventure involves building a Fairbanks-based kennel of her own with her partner, Tucker (who gained his own bit of cult fame by providing wry race updates via LaLonde’s Instagram account). The kennel’s called Lost Sourdough Outfitters and the couple is getting their start by acquiring eight four-year-old dogs they’ve previously trained.
“We’re just starting to clear trees and making room for dog houses and a dog yard, and opening up a puppy pen and everything,” said LaLonde.
And while LaLonde may do the Iditarod again one day, it won’t be in the immediate future.
“We’ll see how the dogs that we are training up, how that goes,” she said. “… And we’re hoping to have puppies here in the summer. We’re going to give ourselves a few more years to raise those puppies up (and train the older dogs in the fall), … and we’ll see. We definitely plan on doing some mid-distance shorter races (with the older dogs) this winter.”
Learn more about the Iditarod at Iditarod.com. Plus, find more stories about metro Detroiters at hourdetroit.com.
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