Imagine traveling from Boston to Salt Lake in about three weeks, averaging about 5 miles an hour, including your stops. Imagine getting about one night's sleep in that time, while needing to make one million decisions and care for 14 dogs in air that dips to 40 below and winds that feel like a rat nibbling your skin. And imagine performing so flawlessly that you go faster than other professionals who have trained all year for the Iditarod and have tuned their teams specifically for that contest.

Such was the experience of Lance Mackey, new Iditarod champion and also Yukon Quest champion. He's the first ever to win both the Quest, from Whitehorse, Yukon to Fairbanks, and the Iditarod, from Willow to Nome, in the same year. A few years back, when people like musher Bob Holder entered both races, we considered them nuts. No way could a musher prepare teams for both races, held less than one month apart. No way could a human recover from the Quest and turn around to care for him or herself and a team of dogs in the Iditarod.

 But Lance has changed it all. And Yukon Quest guys made up five of the top 25 Iditarod finishers this year—Lance (1st), Aaron Burmeister (13th), Hans Gatt (16th), Hugh Neff (20th), and Sebastian Schnuelle (23rd). Maybe the dogs, and the mushers, get in a groove after so much trail time. The dogs become efficient, muscular machines that eat like wolves. The mushers get so far from the soft world of TVs and clean sheets that they get in a primal zone where the trail is their whole world.

Impressive. Impressive.