TAKOTNA -- Jen Seavey grew up a cowgirl, riding the prairie around her family's Lower 48 ranches and dedicating her life to quarter horses. Now she's a musher, driving a sled 1,000-miles on the Iditarod Trail and devoting her life to sled dogs.
In an ironic way, though, the horses delivered her to the dogs, and the 22-year-old from Montana says the dogs helped right her life after she nearly died in a horse accident.
Five years before marrying Iditarod musher Dallas Seavey and moving permanently to Alaska, Jen was delivering a horse to a trainer. The animal got loose, banged her into a wall and came down on her right arm, smashing it and damaging the nerves to her hand.
All feeling in the hand was lost. She spent six months in physical therapy with little improvement.
"They said I'd never move my arm or hand again," Seavey said. "None of my fingers moved. Everything was wasting away."
She was in excruciating pain too. She sought to block it with heavy doses of medication. At one point, she said, she was misdiagnosed with chronic pain syndrome.
"I was comatose on the couch for almost two years," she said.
Time passed, though, and she finally started to get better. She realized she had to do something to take her life back. She started looking for jobs and stumbled on an online advertisement for Seavey's Iditaride Sled Dog Tours in Seward.
She called, talked to Danny Seavey -- the oldest son of former Iditarod champion Mitch Seavey -- and was hired, though she had no dog experience.
"Come on up," Danny told her. "Well see if you last."
Jen bought a one-way ticket. She has lived in Southcentral Alaska almost ever since that fateful day, hopping back and forth from Iditaride Sled Dog Tours on the Kenai Peninsula to the WildRide Sled Dog Show in Anchorage.
Given that most of the muscle in her arm had atrophied in the years after her accident, Jen confessed the first month with the Seavey's was grueling work. She struggled to carry heavy buckets of water and dog food across the dog lot.
"Dog food spilled on me every day," she said. "But I kept on going."
PUTTING PILLS BEHIND HER
To dull the pain, she also kept taking her meds. After a while, though, Danny Seavey said enough to that.
She remembers him sitting her down and saying, "Look, the pain medication isn't healing you, right? You've got to make a decision. Either live like this for the rest of your life or get off that stuff."
On Feb. 14, 2006, Jen took her last pain pill.
"I wouldn't accept it anymore," she said. "It was a neurological pain. I just trained my mind to shut it out."
Carrying five-gallon buckets of water all day in the dog lot proved the best physical therapy possible, she added. Look at her now, and you'd never know anything had gone wrong. She's easily strong enough -- both physically and mentally -- to handle her father-in-law's puppy team in the biggest, longest, toughest dog race on Earth.
"I'm honored to be running a team like this," she said.
All her family knew was raising cattle and horses, Jen said, but she'd always harbored a not-so-secret passion to run dogs some day. She talked about it as a kid, and her dad built her a dogsled out of milk crates so she could ride around behind the family's German shepherd, which wore a horse halter instead of a dog harness.
To this day, though, Seavey doesn't know when she got seriously hooked on dogs.
"I think I watched 'Iron Will' or something," said the fourth-generation cattle rancher now married to a third-generation musher.
THE PERFECT MATCH
Jen said she and Dallas clicked almost instantly when they met.
He picked her up at the Anchorage airport in late December 2005. He helped her around the kennel, showing her the ropes, even helping her harness her first dog.
"Within the first couple days, Danny said we'd get married," Jen said.
It took a while, but the two finally tied the knot April 5, 2008, in Montana -- two years and about four months after they met.
Now they own their own dogs and live in a rented cabin near Soldotna. Both are running the Iditarod this year, but Jen hasn't seen much of Dallas along the trail. He passed her near Skwentna in the first days of the race. He turned around on his sled and they chatted for a few miles before he took off. He has since put together a mighty fine race.
On Sunday, Dallas was in the Iditarod top-10 not far behind his dad, the 2004 Iditarod champ.
"We're going strong," he said in Kaltag. "Top 10 is my best-case scenario. That's what I'm hoping for. But it's not by any means in the bag. We're trying to figure out how to do the next third of the race."
Dallas has already had one big adventure. A cow moose that wouldn't get out of the trail near Nikolai ended up running over his dogs.
"It just ran right through the middle of the team,'' he said. "We didn't even hardly slow down.''
The moose, however, did knock over two dogs. Seavey eventually had to drop both -- one because of the moose injury; the other from a sore shoulder. They are expected to recover.
Jen was in this checkpoint sitting down for a breakfast of pancakes and sausage when she heard about Dallas' close encounter of the moose kind.
"Did he get the moose?" Jen asked. "If anyone can handle it, Dallas is the guy.
"He's completely comfortable in any insane situation. I certainly don't worry about him."
Dallas said the feeling is mutual.
They trained together all winter with 30 dogs, averaging 420 miles a week. Jen said she's been a bit spoiled as a musher, having never driven anything other than a Seavey dog.
"There's so much pride into driving this team," she said. "So many hours into grinding it out, now I'm putting it all together and seeing what it was for."
Before the Iditarod she was nervous, not knowing what to expect, she said. Would traveling through some of the world's most remote country in brutal conditions feel like torture? she wondered.
Turns out she's having the time of her life.
"It's like a vacation compared to training," she said.
And compared to the days when she was inside sitting on the couch moping, the Iditarod Trail is heaven.
"I appreciate every day I can get out and do this stuff," she said. "Even when it's nasty and blowing snow I say, 'Hey, I'm out here.' "
Find Daily News sports reporter Kevin Klott at adn.com/sports/kklott or 257-4335.
Live standings: Musher leaderboard
By KEVIN KLOTT
kklott@adn.com