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Legally blind Rachael Scdoris is the youngest musher ever to complete a 500-mile sled dog race and was twice named one of the nation's 100 Most Outstanding Female Athletes.

“I said, ‘Rachael, we have to define success here. Success for you is finishing this race. That has to be our No. 1 goal,”’ Ellering said. “It was the same for me in 2000. I could have come in here and tried to be competitive. But I was a wrestler running the Iditarod, so that’s how I had to define it at that point. If you don’t finish, it’s like a huge anvil that hangs around your neck for a year.

“If she finishes, it would be historic. Something of this magnitude, with this race, it’s just not been done.”

Scdoris followed Ellering in Sunday’s restart and will communicate with him the rest of the way by shouted directions and two-way radio. She wants to run some of the tough spots at night so she can follow his headlight and avoid the bright sunshine.

Scdoris has the same worries about the Iditarod as everyone else and believes her vision is only a minor complication. Call her visually impaired or legally blind, she says, “just as long as you never call me handicapped or disabled.”

“I refuse to sit back and let life quietly slip past me,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I want to live and experience everything I possibly can. I know there are dangers out there. I accept them. No, I embrace them. Dangers present us with fear. And fear is my fuel. It makes me go. If I did not meet the dangers of this world head on and come to grips with my fear, I would be cheating myself.”

She refused to cheat herself when she competed last year in the 400-mile Beargrease race along the shore and over the ice of Lake Superior. In sixth place at the next to last checkpoint, with five teams catching up, her father told her she had to make a choice — stay there as planned and be well-rested for the finish, or rest briefly there and the next checkpoint to hold her position. If she went on quickly, she risked not finishing at all if her dogs tired and gave up.

“I thought about it for a while, prayed on it a lot, then decided I’m going to go for it, just to see what I can do” she said.

“I sang to my dogs for the last 10 miles, every gospel song I learned in church. One of those songs, ’He Never Failed Me Yet’ really suited the situation and I kept singing it. I guess the dogs got inspired because they made it through and we finished sixth.”

If singing to her dogs get Scdoris’ through the Iditarod, she’ll make history.

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Lm Otero / AP file

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