newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS — Straddling his Specialized mountain bike, John Schauer wore a kayak helmet on his head and BMX elbow pads on his arms as the huskies he had attached to the front of the bike barked and jerked at their tow lines.

Crashing, or at least the very real possibility of it, is a fact of life for bike-jorers like Schauer. They dress for it, but they don’t necessarily like to talk about it.

“That’s like a kayaker saying how long it’s been since he went swimming the last time,” Schauer, himself a kayaker, said, using the term kayakers use for abandoning ship in a gnarly rapid. “You just don’t do it; it’s bad luck.”

Schauer was one of 13 competitors on Saturday in the Alaska Skijoring and Pulk Association’s inaugural dryland race at the Chena Flood Control Project in North Pole. Helmets were mandatory — for humans, not canines — and other protective gear was optional.

Instead of skiing behind their dogs like they normally do skijoring, competitors were pulled on foot, bikes or carts.

“Easy,” Schauer said to the dogs, Riley and Tsania, holding the brakes on his bike to keep them in place as the starter counted down to Schauer’s take off.

When the starter reached zero, Schauer hopped on his bike, released the brakes and both he and the dogs shot down the trail at the Chena Flood Control Project at 20-plus mph. Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong would have been hardpressed to keep pace.

About ten and a half minutes later — 10:36, to be exact — Schauer returned unscathed, at which point he switched out Tsania with his third husky, Willow, and went for another 3-mile circuit.

“I hook up all three of them once in a while,” said Schauer, a 51-year-old instructional technology teacher for the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District.

The maximum number of dogs allowed in the bike-joring division on Saturday was two, which was plenty of dog power for Amanda Byrd, who finished fourth in the 3-mile race with a time of 11:27.

“It takes a little bit of guts sometimes, hooking up more than one dog,” Byrd, a 34-old marketing manager at Goldstream Sports, said after unhitching her dogs, Arvil and Tas. “One of my friends does it with four.”

Growing sport

Dryland racing is popular in the Lower 48, Europe and South America, Byrd said. The International Federation of Sleddog Sports hosts a Dryland World Championship each year, Byrd said.

“It’s amazingly fun,” said Byrd, a sprint musher and skijorer in the winter months. “It’s definitely a good training tool.”

The idea for a dryland race came from Sara Elzey and Andy Warwick, a pair of avid skijorers, who read a story about dryland training in Mushing magazine last fall. They thought it would be fun to do a dryland race in Fairbanks, even after Warwick broke his collarbone running three dogs on a bike last fall, which is one of the reasons a two-dog maximum was placed on the bike-joring division.

“Two dogs is a lot different than three,” said Warwick, a 65-year-old Fairbanks accountant.

Warwick was back in the saddle on Saturday for the first time since his crash last year, competing in both the bike-joring and cart divisions with his three dogs, Licorice, Zip and Boots.

“I’m still a little leary,” said Warwick, who nonetheless won the 3-mile bike-joring division in 9:34, averaging almost 20 mph. “This is the first time I’ve done it all year.”

The key to bike-joring is making sure the towline attaching the dogs to the bike doesn’t go slack and get tangled in the tire.

“You just have to ride the brakes a little bit if (the towline) gets slack,” Schauer said, referring to the line that attached the dogs to the bike. “You don’t want to run over that line.”

That’s a lesson Melissa Rouge, a 30-year-old Fairbanks veterinarian, learned early on in bike-joring.

“I learned that the hard way, don’t let the leash get caught in the tire,” said Rouge, who won the 6-mile bike-joring division with her two dogs, Galloway and Mona, in a time of 22 minutes flat, an average speed of about 18 mph.

Rouge recalled one crash where the towline got tangled in the front tire and she “flew” off the seat of the bike and sailed over the top of her dogs.

“They were looking up at me when I went over them,” she said. “I landed flat on my belly.”

Rouge now uses retractable leashes to hitch her dogs to her bike. It looks like an awkward set up but it helps keep the towline taught, she said.

“That way it pulls back in if they quit pulling,” Rouge said, offering a demonstration by pulling the leash and then letting it go.

Byrd was riding a full-suspension mountain bike equipped with heavy-duty disc brakes. As one might expect, stopping a bike pulled by two huskies can be an issue.

“Disc brakes are your friend,” she said with a smile. “I wouldn’t do this without disc brakes.

Karsten Heuffer hitched his two dogs, Addie and Pence, to a Raleigh road bike complete with curved handlebars, though he used off-road tires.

“I used to bike race so I’m pretty comfortable with it,” Heuffer said of bike-joring.

“It’s a hoot”

There were only three entrants in the cart division, one of which was 19-year-old Beth Callis, who pulled up to the starting line with eight dogs attached a dog sled retrofitted with four large tires and a steering system. Callis’ younger sister, 15-year-old Grace, was sitting in one of two small chairs strapped into the sled, taking video of the race.

A family friend, Jim Sperry, gave the rig to the Callis’, a sprint mushing family who uses it to train their dogs in the fall.

“We actually run 12 dogs on it,” said Beth Callis.

Unlike a bike, it’s not something you load onto the top or back of your vehicle. The Callis’ showed up towing a horse trailer to accommodate the custom-made rig.

Tom Swan of Two Rivers competed in the cart division riding in a Sacco cart, a lightweight, low-to-the-ground, four-wheeled cart pulled by two dogs, Scooby Doo and Amazing Grace.

“It’s a hoot,” Swan said. “It’s different.”

Fresh on the heels of finishing the Equinox Marathon the weekend before, Jodi Bailey was one of three entrants in the canicross, or run-joring, division.

“I’ve run the Equinox and he’s run the (Yukon) Quest so we should be able to do this, even though we’ve never done it together,” Bailey said of her pulling partner, Jake Blues, a husky owned by her mushing partner, Dan Kaduce, a Quest veteran.

After covering the 6-mile course in a blazing 40 minutes and 40 seconds, which is six minutes faster than her previous best 10K time, Bailey said run-joring may be something she incorporates into her training more next years.

“I didn’t know it would work this well,” Bailey said. “I’m totally going to train next year hooked to dogs once or twice a week because it’s good pace training.”