I do like writing about the Iditarod, the Alaskan dog race, and it seems other people really do too. The Huffington Post dedicated a long article to the symbolism of the race and its strange  history.

Rather like the human marathon, the race commemorates a famous occasion on which the track was run for real – a race of mercy when sled dogs were employed to ferry out medicines to children in a remote snow-bound village called Nome, after a bout of diphtheria hit the town in 1925.

Dog-sleds were the only way to get medicine to the town and a team managed to do it in a dramatic feat known as “the race of mercy”.
Faced with the horror of a diphtheria epidemic, village elders came up with the concept of a dog team relay. Each village along the way would make their strongest dog team available for a leg of the trip.

In 127 hours (six days), twenty mushers had covered almost 700 miles in temperatures that hovered around 40 degrees below zero and winds strong enough to blow over dogs and sleds. The serum was delivered to Nome in time to slow the epidemic.

25 miles of the track were raced in the early 60s but now the track of the race stretches the whole way to Nome.  It’s a homage to the brave mushers and dogs who undertook the initial mercy race.