If you think dogsledding is something tourists do on vacation, see Dallas Seavey. At 25 years onetime, he's the youngest winner ever of the Iditarod—completing the one,000-plus mile domestic dog sledding race that spans from Anchorage to Nome in just 9 days. That's about the same distance betwixt Washington D.C. to Miami, but with extreme conditions: snow upward to your knees, 50-degrees below, and no civilization in sight.

Dogsledding isn't anything new to Seavey—he grew upwards watching his grandfather and father race, both of who participated this yr as well. "My dad simply told me, 'We have two chances of winning,'" he says.

So how'd he vanquish the grueling weather condition to come out on peak? Seavey shared his tips with us. (Try this 15-infinitesimal workout to prep you for the slopes.)

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Control What You Tin can

"If you let your environment run through your mind, you lot're going to panic," Seavey says of the Alaskan desert. "And so what practise you focus on? What you lot accept command over." For Seavey, this meant his 12 Siberian-Husky crossbreed dogs, the twoscore pounds of equipment that he wears, and his mental attitude, perhaps the hardest element to control of all. To command his attitude, he kept his focus on the dogs. "If I focus on what I can practise, and what my next best motion is, good matter will happen."

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Prep with a Routine

"I never focused on the checkpoint, I focused on what's going to go me to the checkpoint," he says. What got him to each checkpoint—anywhere from fifteen to 100 miles apart—was keeping a routine despite extreme exhaustion. His pre-race prep? 14 to 16 hours of hunting, and caring for his dogs in his sled each day.

Sleeping was office of that routine, too, since he knew he'd simply become anywhere from 45 minutes to ninety minutes a 24-hour interval on race days. "It'due south like having an outer-body experience," he says of the exhaustion. "You lot're in a cloud. Your trunk simply goes through the motions." To assist fix for the lack of sleep, he'd go on four mean solar day grooming trips with his dogs, napping 45-minutes every four hours. (Here'south another pre-skiing conditioning.)

Before the race, Seavey would practice dropping plastic-wrapped burritos in humid water to thaw them and eat them on the go. The burritos were packed with moose meat—which, yep, he hunted himself.

Piece of work as a Team

His workout was chopping hundreds of pounds of meat, then doing 90 reps of a 30-pound comport lugging buckets of dog food each twenty-four hour period in 40 pounds of layered winter gear. (That's like 90 reps of a heavy farmer'southward walk wearing a weighted vest . . . in unmarried-digit weather.)

"Your troops are your business concern," he says. "And if I train my dogs correctly, I'll naturally be in shape, too," he says. And don't worry, Seavey is trained in canis familiaris CPR in case whatever of them need it. "Merely as much as I can do every bit a man athlete, I'm null to the scale of the race."

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