Nicolas Petit at the ReStart of Iditarod 48. March 8, 2020. |
For Joar Leifseth Ulsom it looks like plans from when he made his racing schedule for the season have changed. While he posted on his site that this would be treated like a training run - it seems he's making a run that's more competitive than training. Matt, too, has a young team that apparently has shown they're ready to race and he's let up on the brake to let them have that experience. Hall's team has reported through out the Copper Basin how GREAT the team is doing. Always good to read that the coach is happy with his team.
If Ahrens has taken her mandatory, she and Gunnar both have a half hour less rest to take than Petit. Ulsom also has just 3.5 hours to take. Hall, like Petit, has four hours left to take. It should be an interesting night, especially since both Matt and Joar's trackers seem to not want to refresh. The current leg for the front runners have a lot of river crossings and potential for overflow is high. There are also some intense (for this race) elevation changes. It could be slow going for a while depending on trail conditions.
Nic's got about 90 miles until the finish. 40 to his final checkpoint and mandatory four hours of rest. His moving average speed according to trackers is 9mph. I don't expect that for this current run, but he'll punch it out of Chistochina. If we give him an 8.5mph average we could see a finish tomorrow around 11:30am or Noon - if all goes well and speed improves from what it is at the moment. We're probably looking closer to 1pm (IFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF my math is correct at all which we all know I'm the worst at this). I just encourage everyone to be ready for a late morning early afternoon finish.
This is not saying that it couldn't change up and we could see someone else take the title away from the reigning champion, but for now Nic has command of the trail and without a trail report we don't know if he will be hindered by being so far up ahead or if this will see a four-peat for the speedy musher.