Seventy-three-year old Canadian Lindsay Gauld, who took to the Iditarod Trail during the pandemic to demonstrate that which you can endure will make you stronger; he’s pictured here at Rohn which can be so pretty just before it bites a biker in the butt /Craig Medred photo
The dogless Iditarod marches north
America might today be facing a serious fitness crisis, but if you have any concerns about the total demise of tough people in these unUnited States, turn your attention north to the tiny and remote hamlet of McGrath, where the Iditarod Trail Invitational 350 is winding to an end with the Invitational 1000 just beginning.
Yes, the shorter of the two races was won by a Norwegian fat-tired cyclist – Justinas Leveika – who grabbed an early lead on the hard-packed trails south of the Alaska Range and then toughed it out to victory at the end of an epic bike-push on bad trail on the north side of those mountains.
It was there that the true tale of the Invitational of 2026 was written.
Early on, the man described as an “off-road, ultra-racing and cult legend” looked to have a chance at setting a new record time for the Invitational 350 from Knik to McGrath, but that dream of going under a day and half died not far out the Rohn checkpoint at the confluence of the Tatina and South Fork Kuskokwim Rivers south of the Rainy Pass portal into Interior Alaska.
It was there the bike race turned into a bike-pushing competition with Leveika and those behind him pushing for tens of tens of miles, and hours and hours, at speeds that sometimes dropped under 2 mph. And this wasn’t becuase any of these people are slow walkers.
It was because pushing a 25-pound bike loaded with another 30 pounds of gear, or more, through even ankle-deep snow is back-breaking work.
Thirty-five-year-old Curtis Henry from Fairbanks, who put up a valiant chase of Leveika from the very start of the race, worked so hard at this that he blew up and ended up reaching McGrath almost half a day behind the winner.
Officially, the Invitational has yet to register him as a finisher there. It would appear he parked his bike and went inside to escape the 40-degree-below-zero cold about the time fellow Fairbankans Tyson Flaharty came into sight.
A Fairbanks animal
Flaharty, the defending 350 champ, is back in the race this year, but he wasn’t ‘racing’ the 350 per se, because he’s racing the full 1,000 miles of the Iditarod Trail to Nome. He intentionally established a slower pace than the race leaders to save himself, and still beat most of the 350 field to McGrath.
Twenty-nine-year-old Chris Olsen from Big Lake, a resort community of sorts north of Anchorage, came in about 8 hours behind Flaharty to officially claim second in the 350. Close behind were 41-year-old John Phelps from Montrose, Colo., and fellow Coloradan Tom Kavanaugh, 41, from Ridgeway.
An ITI veteran, Phelps helps run the San Juan Huts system in the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, Gunnison, San Juan, and Manti La Sal National Forests of Colorado and Utah. Kavanaugh is the head mechanic at Montrose Surf and Cycle.
They finished just ahead of the Czech Republic’s Tomas Vajdiak, who was only minutes in front of 54-year-old Ryan Haug from Fargo, N.D. – not exactly the bike friendliest city in North America. On a list of bike-friendly cities compiled by the League of American Bicyclists, Fargo ranked about 300 cities behind Anchorage.
And yet somehow Haug managed to get in the miles, and you need to get in a lot of miles to train for the Invitational, thus demonstrate that the machines have not co-opted all Americans into couch-potatoism.
The few; the fit; the Iditasporters (to steal from the advertising of the U.S. Marines) are still out there.
As this was written – Ginny Robbins, a 40-year-old cheese maker from Victor, Idaho. – was closing in on McGrath just ahead of Anchorage’s Petra Davis, now age 33 and well-known in the Anchorage cycling community.
She’s been racing bikes since she was a teenager and unfortunately made national news in 2008 when, as a 15-year-old, she was attacked and nearly killed by a grizzly bear while participating in a race in Alaska’s largest city. She was saved, in part, by the first aid efforts of Peter Basinger, the first cyclist on the scene of the attack and a former winner of the 350-mile Iditasport bike race that eventually became the 350 Invitational.
She’ll surely remember everything that happened in this one. Pushing a bike for tens of tens of miles is something you don’t forget, and it does look like she will have the pleasure of being able to beat all the foot racers and skiers to McGrath.
As this was written, she had a lead of about six miles on skier Tucker Costain, a 31-year-old from Fairbanks. The fastest of those on foot – wh0 have their choice of walking, running or snowshoeing – were more than 20 miles behind Costain and still short of the last trail checkpoint in Nikolai.
Forty-four-year-old Gavin Hennigan from Galway, Ireland was there dueling it out with 47-year-old Scott Hoberg from Duluth. They’d maintained an average walking speed of 3.2 mph since leaving Knik on Sunday, which is impressive given that they’ve been wallowing through snow while dragging along sled loads of gear.
Don’t just watch, do
For those in the U.S., 3 miles per hour used to be considered the standard walking speed on nice, firm asphalt or concrete, but a 2024 study published in the peer-reviewed Frontiers in Physiology reported that the speed has now fallen lower.
If you’ve tried to make your way through a major American airport these days, you might have noticed slow walkers are everywhere. See the link to America’s fitness crisis at the top of this story.
“While most (normally sedentary Americans) can walk at speeds reaching up to about 9 km·h (5.5 mph),” the Physiology researchers reported, “they naturally choose to walk at a typical speed around 4.5 km·h (2.8mph) known as the preferred walking speed.”
The study suggested these people would benefit if they picked up the pace, but the researchers concluded that Americans, in general, are now so fat and sedentary that “walking at one’s preferred intensity could be an effective strategy for young sedentary adults to become active, which could “serve as a safe exercise for weight management or disease prevention.
“…It is recommended that physical activity guidelines focus less on prescribing intensities and more on encouraging self-determined active behaviors and intensities, not just for their long-term benefits on adherence and overall health, but also for their potential acute benefits even when performed in short bouts.”
And never mind that slow-walking movement is making Americans not only softer but dumber as well. A whole host of studies have now shown that slow walking is associated with brain decay.
“Certainly, there are some important takeaways from this study for health professionals,” they added. “.First, since walking pace (self-reported and measured) is an easy variable to measure, it can and should be implemented across disciplines as a marker of overall health and brain health. Next, to maintain health throughout the lifespan, walking pace could be targeted as a modifiable marker of physical function.
“With the help of health professionals, we may be able to further implement walking pace as a mainstream vital sign for brain health. So, although we cannot out-walk our genes, maintaining a steady average to brisk walking pace throughout the lifespan may be an essential marker of reduced risk of brain health declines.”
So it’s pretty clear here that Americans shouldn’t just be admiring the human-powered folks who get out the Iditarod Trail and just do it; they should be mimicking these people, given that for all of us, better health is just steps out the door.
