NIKOLAI -- Martin Buser has a new strategy for this year's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
"The motto for this race is, 'How slow can you go,'" Buser said, wearing a fur hat and scraping the snow out of the bottom of his sled bag late Tuesday night at the checkpoint here. "How long can you be out on the trail and still make your flight to Seattle?"
Buser, a four-time Iditarod champion from Big Lake, said he plans to attend the mandatory mushers' banquet in Nome Sunday and then board a plane to Washington state the next day, so he can get back to his oldest son's hospital room. His son, named Nikolai after this Iditarod checkpoint, was critically injured in car crash in Seattle on Jan. 22 and remains in the hospital as he learns how to walk again.
Although Buser can't make phone calls home, he has gotten updates on his son's condition from friends at checkpoints. In Nikolai, someone told him that his 27-year-old son felt a lot better after having two liters of fluid drained from his chest.
"I think about him every moment," Buser said.
The condition of Buser's son's has added perspective to the pain the four-time champion typically feels on the trail, amplified by a bout of pneumonia, which came on last week. Buser coughed up blood on the 180 miles of trail between Skwentna and here. But he said his pain is "so miniscule" compared to that of his son.
"I'm lamenting over a little pneumonia and, heck, a lot of people have it a lot worse," he said. Plus, racing the Iditarod is "voluntary. Nobody made us do it, so we might as well not complain about it."
As Buser quietly repacked his sled bag -- sending home his cough syrup because it made him drowsy -- he said he wanted to take it easy and keep a low profile during this year's race. In the past, Buser has often blown through checkpoints early on and was typically at the front of the pack.
This year, he said, he's taking time to sleep. He rested a couple of hours in Rainy Pass and Rohn. He slept three hours at Nikolai. He also has a pop-up tent -- a luxury item he described as "laughable" and something most mushers would never use. But Buser brought one.
"I've got nothing to prove to anybody," he said.
Buser said he has been using it, in part to sleep outside in the warm temperatures. And in part, to avoid answering "the same questions over and over" that he anticipated everyone would ask.
He left the checkpoint in the dark around 11:40 p.m. with 13 dogs and an American flag wedged between the snowshoes stuck in his sled. He said he planned to rest a little bit in McGrath, where he checked in early Wednesday, and then again in Ophir.
"It's more of a camping trip," he said. "A race is a bit of an exaggeration."