Watch these excited pups race in the annual Fur Rendezvous sled dog 'sprint'

(Image credit: YouTube/Alaska Dispatch News)

last updated 27 February 2016

The most well-known sled dog race is undoubtedly the Iditarod Trail, a 1,049-mile trek through the Alaskan wilderness that has been run in no fewer than eight days and 18 hours. Usually, though, sled dog races are much shorter — such as the annual Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage. Only this year the "Rondy" happens to be much shorter than anyone had anticipated.

The Fur Rendezvous, or Open World Championship, is typically 26 miles, with dogs running in teams as big as 20. However, due to this year's nearly snow-free conditions, the organizers of the Rendezvous truncated the race to just 3.05 miles through the city, Alaska Dispatch News reports. "[It's] as if you had been a person training for the Boston Marathon and then asked to run a 200-yard dash," explained race marshal Janet Clark.

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The unusual format made for scenes rarely glimpsed in the Open World Championships, where mushers start at two-minute intervals. In the Invitational, the 20 mushers were separated into four five-team brackets. The first two mushers left the start line side-by-side, simultaneously — drag race! A third musher took after two minutes after the first two, and then two more mushers took off two minutes after the solo musher.That made for drag racing, normal passes and head-to-head passes — one team, for instance, blazed down the Cordova hill while another team climbed up it. [Alaska Dispatch News]

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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