I know this isn’t anything like a sports blog, but this is so neat I wanted to share. My husband and I are ridiculously proud of Mackey’s achievement, considering we don’t actually know him personally.

Lance Mackey has become the first “double crown” winner in distance sled dog racing, winning both the Quest and the Iditarod in the same year. Some said it couldn’t be done, that there wasn’t enough time between races for the dogs to recover adequately.

One newspaper article quoted Mackey saying that he really didn’t push his dogs very hard on the Quest, that it was more of a training run for the Iditarod.

Twelve days after winning the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest in record time, he reharnessed 13 out of those 16 winning dogs and plunged into the 1,100-mile Iditarod. (He finished with a smaller team, and said eight of those nine dogs were in the Quest).

To cap it all, he is the third member of his family to win the Iditarod, third under bib 13, and the third to win on his 6th attempt.

After a battle with cancer.

The Fairbanks paper called him “Lance Dog-strong” today.

It’s probably as silly as being proud of watching your favorite team win the Super-Bowl in an under-dog, Disney way (it’s the folks on the team who did all the work, after all) but we are excited with him for his victory.

Congratulations, Lance Mackey! We are very proud of your achievement. (And if you decide you want a local co-author for your sure-to-be-coming book deal, well, I could probably help you out– my husband’s a big fan )