A long but magnificent read from Grantland: “Out in the Great Alone.”
It’s an intense and unbelievably detailed story about the Iditarod, by Brian Phillips, a sports writer who “hate[s] snow” and is “not even a dog person.”
Choosing a passage to quote is as difficult as choosing which checkpoint to take your mandatory 24-hour-break at, but here’s one of many good ones:
What you can’t deny, though, is that these animals, having been bred to want to pull sleds, really want to pull them. I mean, the dogs are hysterical, they’re in raptures….It’s like standing inside the mind of a saint right before an out-of-body experience.
