For musher Ellen Halverson, any place but last is fine

WASILLA — Ellen Halverson, a petite psychiatrist, single mother and Iditarod musher, wants to make it to Nome with her sled dog team in this year's race. Any place but last will do.

"Some people think it's really cool to get the Red Lantern. And I think it's cool once," Halverson said, sitting in her Wasilla office recently. Her two Red Lantern trophies sit on her desk, mostly buried behind piles of paper and next to other red lanterns given to her by friends.

Halverson received the red lanterns as trophies for her last place finishes in the 2011 and 2007 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. She's the first Iditarod musher to finish last more than once. Halverson has started and scratched from the 1,000-mile race four other times.

Speaking during her half-hour lunch break last week, Halverson said that she wants to do better this year. Though she is one of only about 750 mushers to ever reach Nome, she's not proud of her mushing career, quick to criticize where she has gone wrong.

"I would like to be able to finish Iditarod and feel like I did everything I could to be kind of competent," she said.

Halverson said that in the past, she has gotten distracted by the actions of other mushers during the race. Sometimes she hasn't made the right decisions about what food to carry in her sled bag or when to snack her dog team. Sometimes, she said, she feared leaving the comfort of the checkpoints.

"I was really scared to leave and head out into the unknown," she said. "I feel less like that this year."

Halverson lives with her 12-year-old son, Peter, in a home between Big Lake and Wasilla. She has 30 sled dogs and a job as a psychiatrist at Providence Behavioral Medicine, where she works about 36 hours a week. As each Iditarod season approaches, she worries about leaving Peter.

"I think that's the most difficult thing for me — the feeling I have leaving, and leaving him," she said. "I think it makes it easier to think about quitting."

Halverson has long run sled dogs. A friend in Minnesota introduced her to mushing. She ran a few races there and logged a few last-place finishes.

"Apparently I've been coming in last since the mid-'90s," she said with a laugh.

In 1998, Halverson moved to Alaska with sled dogs. She ran her first Iditarod in 2002, scratching in Takotna. She scratched again in 2003. Four years later, she won her trophy as the caboose.

Looking back on her years of mushing, Halverson sees how she can improve. She said she doesn't yet feel proud of herself as a musher, though she continues to press on.

Sometimes she feels as though running the Iditarod is a "selfish endeavor." But then she hears from patients, friends and volunteers who are excited about the race and she tries telling herself, "This is bigger than you."

"When I think about that, it makes me feel less selfish," she said. "So then it's kind of OK for me to do this and hopefully not sabotage myself."

Halverson said she had hoped to train more this winter but higher-than-normal temperatures melted snow on trails near her house. Snowless and icy trails battered her snowmachine, which she hooked her dogs to for evening runs.

At work, she wore ankle weights in a last-ditch effort to mimic bunny boots and gain strength to stand for long hours on her sled runners. While Halverson said more snow and more days on her sled runners would be nice, the Iditarod doesn't wait.

"We're out of time," she said.