Race season is underway

The 2012/2013 race season is off to a slow start here in Alaska, due in part to poor snow conditions and in part to cold temperatures.  Here in the interior, the Two Rivers Dog Mushers Association had to cancel our early season fun run, the Two Rivers Tuneup, because there wasn't enough snow.  We finally got a nice dumping right before the Solstice 100 but the temperature plummeted immediately afterwards and we could not in good conscience ask our trail crew to risk their safety and their equipment to put in a trail.  Yes, it was that cold.

In other locations around Alaska, the Sheep Mountain 150 was cancelled because of poor snow.  Fortunately races in the Mat-Su Valley the last two weekends were able to come off (the Alaska Excursions 120 and the Aurora 50/50).  The first really big-deal race, the Top of the World 350, is this coming weekend, with a fascinating format and an extraordinary field of teams.  I'm going down for the start, and hope to be able to grab some video of their mass start.  They'll have a fun run up the Taylor Highway from Tok to Eagle, have a potlatch in Eagle, and then race back to Tok.  The race is to honor the memory of Chief Isaac Juneby and promises to be a really special event.  They won't have trackers on the dogsleds this year but it's my understanding that Scott Chesney will be travelling the trail on a snow machine, so we can look forward to some outstanding photographs and video.

A couple of things have come up that I'll be writing about when I get a bit more free time.  One is that Trackleaders has added some new features that we'll be exploring, including a replay button to allow you to replay races.  It promises to be an interesting tool.  I'm hoping that they'll beef up the race flow chart but so far it appears to be much like last year's.  It's a fantastic tool for understanding the race being tracked and I hope it gets built out a little bit.  (I also think that IonEarth, the folks who track Iditarod, should look at Trackleaders' software and learn a thing or two about data presentation - their software is absolutely primitive by comparison).

Another thing that's come up and is enormously interesting (to me, anyway - it's likely to be a yawner for a lot of people) is that there are questions about last year's Yukon Quest corrected run times.  I haven't taken it apart quite yet but it looks like there are some problems leading to nonsensical numbers.  Note that this has absolutely no impact on the outcome of the race, but it's a puzzler and I'll be looking at it when I get a chance.

Here's looking forward to another great season of dogsled racing.

They're back! But this time they're self-funded

According to this article by Helen Hegener, Mark Gillette and Scott Chesney are going to be back this year, providing video and photographs from the Yukon Quest trail.  They did an exceptional job last year and provided an excellent example of what's possible with cheap GoPro cameras if you've got some skill and some talent.

For example, video from the start:

A wrap-up of moments large and small from the race:

and definitely take a look at their photos on Facebook, and on Flickr if you don't use Facebook (the Facebook albums are more complete).

However, this year they're self-funded (that is to say, unlike last year they are not getting financial support from the Quest organization), and in addition to the videos and photographs they'll be producing they're also going to be publishing a high-quality coffee-table book with images from the race.  They're using a community-funding model to help support what they're doing, and providing incentives at differing funding levels.  That is to say, they're asking for your help, but you get something in return for your support.  For example, for $50 or more you get a copy of the book, while at $150 you get an autographed copy of the book along with an opportunity to spend time with one of several very popular Quest mushers.  For $500 you get a copy of the book and participation in a post-race photographic workshop.  The Kickstarter link to help fund their effort is here.

I think for a lot of us who love this race, it's not just that it's an exciting sporting event but that we care about the people and dogs who run it and that we know that there are stories coming from the trail that are dramatic, funny, moving, and engaging.  Scott and Mark are going to be bringing those stories in from the trail through pictures and video.  If you care about the race I think this is one way to support it.

Top of the World 350

There's a new race this year, the Top of the World 350, and right now I think it's probably going to be the most interesting race of the season.  The race is to honor the memory of Chief Isaac Juneby of Eagle Village.

Why's this an interesting race?  A number of reasons:

• It's attracted a field of very top mushers from both Alaska and the Yukon.  This is an all-star race
• The format is novel.  There's going to be a "fun run" from Tok to Eagle Village, a potlatch and dance for the mushers, and then the race starts for real when the mushers depart Eagle Village for Tok.  The run up to Tok begins with a mass start, which is always pretty great entertainment
• It's a tough trail -- hilly, windblown, and remote

They will not be providing GPS tracking for this race, which will definitely make it more difficult to follow.  I'm hopeful that the checkpoint staffs will keep their website updated, and possibly have volunteers/fans posting from the trail on how things are going more generally.  Even though the first 175 miles are a "fun run" and have no direct impact on standings, you can expect a couple of teams to let their competitive natures get the better of them and gun it up to Eagle Village, possibly tiring their dogs for the actual race.  We can make some bets on who that will be, but I'm sure we'd be surprised.  I wish we could watch it in realtime, but in the meantime I'm thinking of going down to Tok for the start or finish, because I do think this is going to be a special race.  I'm absolutely wishing them the very best.  This is going to be a good 'un.

So, how big is our market, anyway?

If I were trying to make some money selling software to mushers I think one of the first questions I'd have is the size of the market.  I'm not really sure how to answer that question with any precision, beyond noting that intuitively it seems that trying to make some money from selling something other than dog food or equipment seems destined to be, er, "frustrating" (and some kinds of equipment seem challenging, as well).  But for an imprecise measure I took a look at Jacques Phillipe's nice Web Kennel content management site, acknowledging that he's trying to solve a rather different problem from the one being addressed by Musher's Checkpoint et al.  He's got nearly 500 kennels signed up, and I took a look at the listings to try to get a handle on how many of them are paying customers and how many are using it for free.  A rough estimate is that about 10% of his users are paying subscribers, or about 50.  I would guess (with an emphasis on guess) that that percentage would be likely to go up if he supported tracking training runs, adding veterinary records, etc., but even if it went up to 100% of his users that would still be about 500.  If you were able to sell some chunk of software magic to about 500 people at $100/pop, which strikes me as about what the market would bear, that would still be a gross of only $50,000.  Subtract expenses from that and it strikes me as not really worth anybody's while, acknowledging that I could be underestimating the size of the market by some amount.  Or, for that matter, overestimating it.

I guess where I'm going with this is that it strikes me as extremely difficult to come out much ahead selling software to mushers.  A more productive model may be to start out small and simple and give stuff away for free, and community input/participation will grow the software in ways that people actually find useful for their own purposes.  I believe the young people call this "open source," while those of us d'un certain âge recognize it as the way that things used to work more generally.

Why I'm not trying "Musher's Checkpoint"

Musher's Checkpoint is a new hunk of software that provides a very nice interface for maintaining kennel and training data.  Putting together small-scale databases is relatively straightforward (maintaining big hairball ones is a nightmare, but that's not what we're talking about here), but good user interfaces are difficult to design, and not everybody who writes software is good at it.  In fact, few are.  I'm terrible at user interface design and I really respect people who get it right.

Musher's Checkpoint also maintains much of the data I would if I were designing something similar from scratch.  Which, in fact, I am, but pretty much the only time I have to code for myself anymore is the week known as "breakup" in the Alaska interior, when we're done running dogs for the spring, it's too early to fish, and it's too muddy to work outside.  So in the abstract I'm delighted to see that somebody else has done the work.

The specifics are a little more difficult, though.  For one thing, as nearly as I can tell (the website doesn't really say) it only runs on Windows.  There was a time when I'd rather have stuck a fork in my eye than run Windows but now that I'm older and a little wiser I'm forgoing the fork and just not running Windows unless I have to for something I'm working on.  I know other mushers who only run Mac OS, so I'm not the only one.

But the show-stopper is this: annual licensing.  It's not a matter of the money, although of course there's a concern that after a couple of years the license fee could be jacked up.  The core issue is ownership of data, and access to it in perpetuity.  When I enter my dogs' pedigrees, their vet records, my training schedules, awkward photographs of unfortunate mishaps, etc., those are MY data.  I do not want to lose access to them, ever.  I've been orphaned by software companies going out of business and it's bad enough when it's just a regular one-time license fee.  If the company goes under for any reason and they are unable to renew the license because of problems on their end, I lose access to my data (note that this is a similar concern with "cloud computing" - make sure you've got local copies of anything you put in Google Docs Drive, etc.).  I am not going to take that risk - it's too much work to enter and maintain those data in the first place.

So, from my perspective it looks like a nice piece of software with a good user interface but a business model that makes me nervous (plus the platform issue).  I'm giving it a pass for the time being, and maybe next April I'll make some more progress on my own excellent database with the crappy user interface.

Musher Central

If you like dogsled race data, or are a mushing trivia fan, you'll enjoy the website, "Musher Central," quite a bit.  They've consolidated a lot of data about a few of the major distance races, in one place, and have aggregated some of it to provide interesting overviews.  For example, if you go to the summary page on our favorite race, the Yukon Quest, you'll find not just the most wins and most top-ten finishes, but also most starts without a win, most scratches, and other fun information.  There are summaries for individual runnings of the race, and summary pages for individual mushers.

There are really only two drawbacks.  One is that the site is kind of ugly (friends don't let friends use Javascript unless they're trained professionals working together with someone who's got a clue about user interfaces) and doesn't provide a way to link to individual race runnings (see previous comment about friends and Javascript).  The other is that the data are a little incomplete and occasionally surprising (for example, he's got data for the Minto race but not the Copper Basin, and nothing at all for the Kusko or Tustumena or a few other major races), and most of the races only have data for last year.  But it's a hard slog to put this kind of thing together and Jeff deserves both kudos and support for putting up this website.  I hope he's able to find the resources to continue to build his database, go further back on the races he's already got, and include more races.

IFSS Distance "World Championship" participation

There's much that can (and should) be said about the IFSS, its drive to get mushing adopted as an Olympic sport, and its insane and dog-hostile anti-doping rules, but that's probably got to wait until dust settles and we get a clearer picture of what's going to happen with the North Pole championships.  In the meantime, what we know for certain is that the distance "championships" will be held while Iditarod is underway.  What does this mean?  It means that the "Distance World Championship" will be held without the participation of the following mushers:

• Ken Anderson
• Aaron Burmeister
• John Baker
• Jake Berkowitz
• Martin Buser
• Paul Gebhardt
• Pete Kaiser
• Jeff King
• Lance Mackey
• Allen Moore
• Dallas Seavey
• Mitch Seavey
• Cim Smyth
• Ramey Smith
• Gerry Willomitzer
• Aliy Zirkle

As well as top-level purebred mushers Mike Ellis and Karen Ramstead.

So.  I wonder how on earth a "world championship" that excludes 4-time Iditarod champions and consistent top performers can possibly considered a "world championship."  This would seem to be an enormous marketing error on the side of IFSS (and possibly MUSA), but perhaps not a surprise given the lack of distance mushing experts in the IFSS and MUSA processes.