West Virginian wins 1,000-mile Iditarod FOOT race

West Virginia native John Logar, 38, an emergency room physician with Davis Health System in that town near Blackwater Falls, won the 1,000-mile Iditarod FOOT race. No dogsled. Logar just walked the thousand miles in 23 days, 23 hours and 10 minutes.

John Logar

The foot race, which follows the famous Iditarod Dog Race Trail from Knik Lake in Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, began Feb. 23. No one who had not already completed at least a 350-mile foot race was allowed to participate.

Logar trained for the event in the Potomac Highlands of Tucker County.

He had some problems near Koyuk from, he suspects, eating bad food. He also had to navigate glare ice and snowdrifts, which in Alaska are a lot worse than in or near West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle.

Leave it up to a politician to get into the act.

Tucker County Commission President Mike Rosenau pronounced: "It tells you how tough Tucker Countians are."

Paula and I have not witnessed an Iditarod dogsled race, but we did visit the training camp of four-time Iditarod champ Jeff King in Denali Park. King won the Iditarod dogsled title in 1993, 1996, 1998 and 2006.

To read the entire article in the Elkins Inter-Mountain, provided to me by Jeanette Barr Baczuk, Class of 1940, who lives in Ashland, Ohio, click on http://www.theintermountain.com/page/content.detail/id/569015/