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Surviving the Iditarod
Topics: Sports-SkiingLife Experience-Purpose and MeaningHealth-Mindfulness

Surviving the Iditarod
Topics: Sports-SkiingLife Experience-Purpose and MeaningHealth-Mindfulness
Surviving the Iditarod
Sunny Stroeer: Many folks have heard of the Iditarod Sled Dog race, which is the last great race on earth where mushers compete to cover the distance from Anchorage to Nome as quickly as possible.
The Iditarod Trail Invitational is the human-powered version of that very same race. You're covering almost a thousand miles, either on foot, on bike, or by ski.
Dan Morrell: Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. In March 2024, Sunny Stroeer (MBA 2011) and six other skiers stood at the starting line of the Iditarod Trail Invitational, ready to do something that had never been done before in the history of the race: Complete a 1,000-mile trek across the Alaskan mainland from Anchorage to Nome on skis.
Stoeer was familiar with the territory, if not the scale: She had competed in two versions of the race—known as the ITI—three times before, once on a fat tire bike in 2023 and on skis in 2021 and 2022. But both of those races were the "short" distance—a mere 350 miles. This one, she knew, would push her to her limits.
Her path to the starting line that day began during her time at HBS, when she first got into adventuring. She continued running ultramarathons and adventuring in her free time after she graduated and became a consultant, but soon realized that she had to make a choice. “Adventure,” Stroeer says, “was the thing that grabbed my soul and that made me thrive and feel fulfilled."
She's been in the adventure field full-time since the end of 2015, competing in outdoor events and running a backcountry guiding service in Southern Utah.
In this episode of Skydeck, Stroeer tells contributor April White about what drives her to compete, walks us through the daily mental and physical challenges of the ITI, and discusses the deeper meaning of the finish line.

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Sunny Stroeer: I've always been enthralled with big, challenging, daunting goals, and one of the adventure challenges that I kind of latched onto—many years ago, actually at this point—was the idea of potentially wanting to ski solo to the South Pole.
That seems like an epic adventure, an epic mission, but the challenge with that was that I had no experience with extreme cold and I had no experience on cross country skis. So I was trying to figure out how to build my resume, essentially, as an adventure athlete and do something that would potentially prepare me for the South Pole.
Training for the ITI is really difficult. A lot of it actually is trying to think about what your mindset is going to be out there, how uncomfortable you're going to be, how difficult things are going to be, how deep you're going to have to dig because you're in the middle of the night, in negative 50 degrees, with the wind howling and potentially wolves howling, not too far from you either. A lot of it is mental preparation and building the skills and the confidence in your own capabilities, knowing that you have what it takes to keep yourself safe in extreme conditions when you are your only option.
The Iditarod Trail Invitational starts on a frozen lake not too far from Anchorage. Typically, all the competitors show up about two to three hours ahead of race start, which is at two o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, the weekend before the dogs start their race.
The mood at the start line is usually very friendly and very casual to start with, because everybody has time to spare and there's a bar and there's beer and burgers and all the things, and you see old friends that you know from prior editions of the race. And then somehow magically every time—for me anyway, no matter how many times I start the race—the last 30 minutes, all of the sudden are just frenzied and hectic. And you're starting to think about, okay, did I bring everything? Do I have everything?
To compete in the ITI, you need to carry all of your survival gear. You need food, you need water, you need warmth, you need to be able to protect your hands, your feet. You probably need a sleeping bag, you probably need a way to go and cook meals and all of that. I carried about 45 to 50 pounds depending on the day, and I had both a backpack and a sled.
And something that you have to know about the ITI is that while there is a set course, as in you have to start in a certain spot, you have to finish in a certain spot and you have to hit checkpoints along the way. There is no set trail, so it's entirely up to you how you get from point to point. I had no ambition to go and be fast or spend as few days as possible out there. My desire was to try and come in under the 30 day cutoff and as such, hopefully become the first woman to ski that race.
When I started my journey to Nome, I came in with probably an exaggerated amount of optimism because I was looking at the distance and I said, okay, a thousand miles—or actually probably realistically closer to 950 miles—30 days, that means that I'm going to have to do just under 32 miles a day.
That shouldn't be too hard. So if I have to ski 12, 13, 14 hours a day, I mean, that'll be pretty good. I'll be able to do it in just under three miles an hour average, hopefully. Well, it turns out that that was not at all how things ended up happening. I averaged closer to 2.3 miles an hour or so. And what that meant was that I had many, many days where I was skiing for 16 to 20 hours.
But you can't just ski and then go to sleep. You have to do chores. You have to make food for yourself, you have to refill your water, which if the temperatures are down below freezing, you're going to have to melt snow, you're going to have to tend to your feet and any sort of niggles and blisters and whatever else is going on. You have to take care of your gear.
So really, I was looking at the minimum of three hours or so of chores a day. Twenty-four hours in the day, three hours of chores, and I'm skiing 14 to 20 hours. So you do the math on the sleep. There wasn't a lot.
The landscape that you encounter on the Iditarod Trail is really difficult to describe. Starting out, leaving from the area around Anchorage, you're just leaving the road system and you're starting to ski through a whole bunch of kennels and dog trails, and then you start getting onto lakes and rivers and swamps and everything just starts getting big and you see Denali on the horizon and the distance, and then you ski into the Alaska range. So all of a sudden you're in this huge, incredible mountain ridge and you're in deep narrow valleys and in gorges, but then you have sections through the interior that are just wide open tundra. You have a number of ghost towns along the Iditarod Trail with old dilapidated buildings and ruins and mining infrastructure, and there's all these random trucks and cars parked in the middle of nowhere and you're like, how did this get here? It makes no sense.
And then you get into the Yukon and the Athabaskan communities and small native villages, and then you get to the coast. And the coast is a really big deal because the final roughly 200 miles or so, 250 miles, of the Iditarod trail, run along the shore off the Bering Strait, and you actually end up crossing the Norton Sound on sea ice. That's a temporary trail only passable in the winter, of course. The wind's howling and everything’s bare. It's just, it’s wild.
Mile 500 started being a little bit challenging because I got frostbite and for a little while I wasn't sure if I was going to be safe to continue on the trail. I was wearing everything that I had and I was still cold. I knew that the only way that I could get out of that situation was to keep moving forward, but I was getting more and more tired and more and more strung out. And so from a physical and a mental management perspective, that was really difficult, but in some ways I was still enjoying myself actually, and I was embracing the challenge, and that's what I had signed up for.
There were so many moments where I thought about whether or not I should drop out or would want to drop out, and then I thought about what I'd do with the potentially multiple weeks of lifetime that I'd get back if I were to drop out. And almost every time my insight was that I didn't want that lifetime back. There was no other place that I'd rather be at than to be on the trail at that moment in those conditions. Anything else just didn't have the same allure. But that said, I did have a moment or two that felt really difficult emotionally and where I was questioning my choices.
One of those moments was around mile 750 probably. I was at the very back of the field. I hadn't really seen many other racers. I was skiing through this section called the Kaltag Portage Trail that connects the Yukon River to the coast that takes you through this beautiful valley with some very, very beautiful shelter cabins as well.
Cold, unheated, unmanned, but still very beautiful.
I arrived at the first shelter cabin sometime in the afternoon, and I was seeing signatures from dozens if not hundreds of people on the wall, just mushers that had passed by over the years, trappers, hunters, other Iditarod Trail Invitational participants. And then I saw the logbook in the cabin, and it actually had an entry from one of the ski racers that was a couple of days ahead of me. And he had written something about how absolutely magical that place was and how it was so hard for him to leave because it was beautiful, it was warm, they got a fire going, he had great company and all these people that he was spending time with, and I sat there all by myself with nobody else coming behind me, hadn't seen anybody in a long time. And I just felt really lonely and really low because I was realizing that the experience that I was having on the trail doing this mostly by myself and in solitude was completely different from the community and the experience that a lot of the other folks were having.
But when that happened, first off, I didn't let myself linger. I said, okay, don't feel sorry for yourself. Again, you chose this. You sign up for this. Just put your skis back on, keep skiing, and no matter how you feel right now, it's going to change. That's a truth I think in life as well as in ultra endurance racing. Doesn't matter how high you are, you're going to stop feeling high. Doesn't matter how low you are, you're going to stop feeling low at some point.
The other thing that I did was I did send a number of messages on my GPS communicator to my husband and to my friends and to people at home saying, Hey, I'm feeling really lonely. And I got some community and some connection through that. And then I just put my skis back on and I put music on, which is not something that I did a lot, but I listened to songs like Hotel California and Happy to Be Here and just kept skiing and a couple hours later, everything was good again.
Once that part was behind me, I'm now at the coast and the coast is frequently considered one of the most difficult sections because the winds are unrelenting, the winds are strong enough that they can flip over snow machines, they'll rip sled bags off of sleds. The other concern was having to go across the Norton Sound on the sea ice. It had been stormy, it had been warm, it had been very windy, and that typically creates a condition called overflow on the ice where the wind is essentially pushing sea water up onto the existing ice, flooding the trail. I was the last racer across the sea ice, and it did start to flood as I was going across. However, I was lucky because it was only flooding in very small sections right at the beginning and right at the end, and I was able to make it. So at this point, I had maybe 150 miles left to Nome, and I knew that from a schedule perspective, if I kept my pace, I should be able to finish within the cutoff.
And I was past the Norton Sound. So that kind of big mental and actual very real crux was behind me. Of course, things didn't stop there because the weather continued to be very, very difficult. And I had been dealing with extremely cold temperatures in the Alaskan interior and degrees down to negative 50. I was now looking at a temperature swing of about 80 degrees, and I had temperatures in the thirties, which sounds pleasant, maybe, but it's actually not because you're not looking at rain and sleet, and there's nothing more dangerous than being wet in cold conditions, which 30 degrees is still cold. So the rain was really difficult. It made things dangerous. It also made the trail almost impassable.
And as a matter of fact, there was a moment where I got word from racers about half a day ahead of me that they had gotten shut down and had to turn around because the trail was buried under about two feet of fresh, wet cement snow. I more or less caught up to the folks that had gotten shut down and turned around, and we were in a shelter cabin right between these two small villages, Elim and Golovin that are about 20 miles apart or so.
And somehow the mayor of one of the communities heard that we were in a pickle and came out on his snow machine at 9:30 p.m. and broke trail for all of us. So that was wonderful, and it was amazing. So we made it past there we're now about a hundred miles or so from the finish, and it seems like it should be smooth sailing, you should be home free. And of course, that still wasn't the case.
We had one day of great trail conditions. I had a fantastic day of skiing. And then I got to White Mountain, which is the last community before Nome. It's about 70 miles out and from White Mountain, you now ski on a river for a little while, coastal river.
Then you have to go through the Topkok hills, which are notorious for very high winds, and there is a weather advisory and another storm moving in. I decided to sit in White Mountain for a little while, try and let the worst of the storm pass through, and then pushed into the hills while it was still incredibly high winds and white-out conditions and ground blizzard, and it was very, very difficult, but I was able to make it through. Now we’re 45 miles from Nome and really 45 miles in the scheme of a thousand-mile race, right? It's nothing. I have a day and a half left on the clock, which should be plenty for me. Well, the temperatures are now so warm that my skis are icing up, and it's like I have Velcro on the bottom of my skis and zero glide and it was so bad that I had to take the skis off and walk.
So it was just a never ending string of difficult conditions for those final days into Nome. And that was a worthwhile way to finish the race.
One of the beautiful things about doing a race like this is that for me anyway, it's a form of active meditation. And I knew that I was having a good day when I spent 14, 15, 16 hours just in my head with my thoughts, with my memories and feeling entirely present in the moment, just the fluidity and the continuity of being in that present mindful state for so long. That is such a relief compared to day-to-day life and the stresses of being in business and just being a human in the 21st century.
As you come into Nome, you start being on the road system probably about four or five miles before the finish line, which is really jarring in some ways because I had spent 30 days—I'd spent a whole month, essentially—away from roads and away from proper infrastructure, and all of a sudden there are cars and snow plows and street lights and houses. And there was another competitor who'd done the short distance in the ITI who ran out in his truck and brought me a burrito to get me through the last five miles. So it was just very strange and very surreal, but also amazing. And then folks were honking their horns and yelling congratulations and cheering me on.
I was skiing along Front Street in between a bunch of traffic and people going to work and doing all the things, and then pulled around the corner to find the Burled Arch, which is the traditional Iditarod race finish line. And there were a couple of people, volunteers from the race and a couple of locals that were excited, and I was just relieved to not have to ski anymore. The distance that I covered was right around 950 miles. I was out there for almost exactly 30 days. I was the first woman to get across the finish line with about an hour and 54 minutes to spare on the clock.
The thing that I have been chasing in my life and still chase is discovery, and it is exposure to uncertainty in a way that keeps me engaged, but doesn't endanger me to a ridiculous degree.
When I go out and I go on big adventures, be that really long distances, high altitude, extreme cold, extreme remoteness, and solitude, whatever it may be, I learn new things about the world, about myself and about how I interact with the world and difficult, challenging situations. There are so many things and so many situations where I'm exposed to entirely new elements where I'm just like, I have no idea how I'm going to do this. And it keeps me on my toes, it keeps me engaged.
And while it may seem like it's a very physical pursuit, in some ways, the reason that I'm out there as an adventure athlete is not the physicality of it. As a matter of fact, I consider myself a very lazy athlete. For me, it's all about the mental and the emotional and the strategic, psychological side of things. And that’s what keeps me coming back.
This episode of Skydeck was produced by April White and edited by Jocelyn Gonzalez from PRX Productions, with assistance from Craig McDonald at HBS. It is available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.
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