WILLOW -- Martin Buser came down with pneumonia.
Wade Marrs got hit with the flu.
As if running a team of sled dogs about 1,000 miles to Nome wasn't hard enough, two top contenders are taking on this year's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race with the kind of crud that would lay most folks low for days.
Eighty-five mushers hit the trail Sunday on Willow Lake, site of the race's official start after the ceremonial start in Anchorage on Saturday.
A festive crowd sent them off -- organizers expected at least 15,000 people -- amid sunny weather and glimpses of Alaska Range peaks on the horizon. Fans lined the starting chute for more than a mile.
Mushers and their teams face a daunting trail ahead: icy and fast early to Skwentna with a confusion of braided trails on the Susitna River and rumors of blown-out ice bridges farther up at Dalzell Gorge. The trip to Skwentna was a quick one for Ketil Reitan, who pulled into the second checkpoint along the trail at 9:06 p.m. Sunday, the first to arrive. Reitan is a veteran of the Iditarod, but it's been more than 20 years since his last race -- he ran from 1991 to 1994, with his highest finish coming in 1992, when he pulled into Nome in 10th place. Wearing bib number 6, Reitan was also one of the first mushers to depart Willow earlier in the day.
Despite the uncertainty up the trail, Buser and Marrs had left the chute smiling and waving Sunday afternoon.
"It's March," Buser said a few hours before the race's 2 p.m. start. "Where am I gonna be in the beginning of March other than here?"
He chuckled and immediately fell victim to a brief but uncontrollable coughing fit.
Buser, the 57-year-old four-time race champion from Big Lake, has a reputation for bull-headed ferocity. He ran the 2005 Iditarod with half the middle finger of his right hand freshly amputated following a table-saw accident a few days before the race. He finished the 2014 race with an ankle badly sprained by a rough run in the area known as the Farewell Burn, site of a wildfire decades ago.
But this year has been particularly grueling.
Buser's 27-year-old son Nikolai, critically injured in a Seattle multicar crash in January, remains hospitalized at Harborview Medical Center there, but is now in rehab and out of the "life-threatening" status that kept his father close by.
Buser figures he probably picked up his illness in the hospital, where he was vulnerable due to sleeplessness on all those worried nights with Nikolai. He said he's taking several medications on the trail: a steroid inhaler, cough syrup and antibiotics for two more days.
He slept for 12 hours Saturday night -- his first good sleep since the car crash, Buser said. "I wish I had two or three nights more."
DeeDee Jonrowe, a longtime friend, said Buser has reason to be worn out. Jonrowe, marking her 34th Iditarod start, has had her own trials: She and husband Mike lost their Willow home to the Sockeye Fire last summer. Jonrowe lost her mother to cancer about a month after the fire.
"I think I'm run down but Martin's been through it way more in the last month than I have," she said Sunday.
At least Wade Marrs has youth on his side: he's just 25. He's also got a hashtag: #ironwade.
But the malady afflicting Marrs came on more recently than Buser's.
Marrs, who finished eighth last year, came down with a vicious influenza strain circulating in Willow. Zombie tired, aching and chilled, he visited an urgent care clinic Thursday.
A provider there told him he had the flu, Marrs said on the lake Sunday. He got a Tamiflu prescription.
Marrs downed a massive medium-rare ribeye steak and some curry shrimp rice a few hours before his start.
"I feel really good, but whenever I do activity, it takes a lot out of me quicker," he said.
He's hoping for chicken soup at some checkpoints.
Ryan Redington, from the Knik mushing dynasty headed by the late Joe Redington Sr., the Father of the Iditarod, was checking last-minute details on Willow Lake Sunday. Ryan recalled a bug that struck for a couple days on an earlier Iditarod in Takotna, sending chills through his system to the point he got his wife to fly additional winter gear to the Ruby checkpoint so he could try to stay warm.
Redington wished Buser and Marrs -- both friends -- good luck.
"I know it's a bummer to be sick in the race," he said.
At least one canine athlete came down with a medical problem before the race, too.
One of Mitch Seavey's leaders emerged from the dog truck onto the lake with a limp Sunday morning, according to a post on Seavey's IdidaRide Sled Dog Tours Facebook page. "This is like starting your back up quarterback in the Super Bowl."
Contact Zaz Hollander at zhollander(at)alaskadispatch.com