Local woman working toward completing the Iditarod

• Laura Neese, of Madison Township, is living in Michigan and training for the Iditarod.
• Neese got interested in dog racing when she was 9 during a school project.
• Her parents, who still live in Licking County, are passionate about following her career.

MADISON TOWNSHIP – Laura Neese started waking up at the crack of dawn to watch the Iditarod contestants cross the finish line when she was 10 years old.

For her 14th birthday, she asked for only one thing — her very own Alaskan husky.

Growing up, the Madison Township teenager knew sled dogs and mushers like some people knew the stats for their favorite baseball players. When other people were inside, trying to avoid the cold, she was outside training and caring for her dogs.

So her parents, Jeri and Mark Neese, weren’t surprised at all when Laura, 18, decided to move her dogs to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — where there is much more snow — with hopes of training for the 2016 Iditarod Trail sled dog race.

This week, she is participating in the final race of her season, the Canadian Challenge sled dog race. She led her team 300 miles over several days.

She’ll be back in Licking County during the summer, finishing her degree in veterinary technology. Then she’ll head back to Michigan to train.

“She’s very determined,” Jeri said. “I hope she’s able to do everything she’s been dreaming about.”

When Jeri and Mark talk to people about their youngest daughter, they usually get asked how a girl from central Ohio got interested in dog sledding.

When Laura, who was home-schooled, was 9, Jeri decided they would follow the Iditarod for a school project.

The race, which goes 1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, gave Jeri the opportunity to teach Laura geography and graphing. They read the biographies of all the mushers, learned about their dogs and followed the race on a map.

“I thought it was really fascinating,” Laura said. “I just feel in love with it and knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

Laura started reading everything she could find about dog sledding and watched videos about racing.

In 2010, she got her first dog, Acadia, and then bought seven more dogs. She decided to start her own kennel, which she called Livin’ A Dream.

She bred Acadia, who had eight puppies. Those dogs became her sled team.

To develop a bond, she slept on a cot beside the pups for their first nine weeks of life and took them for walks every day. She would often do her homework outside with the dogs, Jeri said.

When they were old enough, she began training them but quickly found that Licking County isn’t the best place to run sled dogs.

“It was a challenge to train here because of the lack of snow and higher temperatures. You can’t run the dog in their harnesses if it’s over 50 degrees,” Laura said. “We did a lot of training at night and working around the challenges of no snow and the heat.”

She would train the dogs by running or biking beside them. She also would hitch them up to an all-terrain vehicle in gear.

“She used to run around and around (our property) just to give them enough miles to do a 30-mile race.” Jeri said. “But she never complained.”

Laura and the dogs competed in several dry land events, and she tried to get her sled out whenever she could.

In 2013, she and her family started taking trips to the Upper Peninsula so she could run the dogs in deeper snow.

Last year, Laura considered going to Alaska where the weather was better for the dogs. But she ultimately decided to become a dog sled tour guide at Nature’s Kennel in the Upper Peninsula.

While she was there, the kennel’s owner, Ed Stielstra, noticed her strong bond with the dogs. He offered her the opportunity to race his dogs and learn from him, Jeri said.

“So we ended up making a plan to run my qualifying races this year and run the Iditarod next year (in 2016),” Laura said.

Laura ran several races this season, including the UP 200 in Michigan and the Eagle Cap Extreme Sled Dog Race in Oregon.

“Running that race really showed me that this is what I want to do,” she said. “Just being out there with the dogs for days, camping with them, it was everything I had heard about and dreamed about all these years.”

Most sled dog races, especially ones that are 200 or 300 miles long, last several days, Laura said.

As a musher, her main responsibility is caring for the dogs on her team, especially when they stop at a checkpoint.

“You have to feed your dogs right away and give them a nice bed of straw,” she said. “I have to make sure all their needs are cared for and then maybe grab an hour or two of sleep myself.”

But Laura said that being with her dogs is the best part of racing.

“It’s a lot tighter of a bond than a normal pet dog because you are spending so much time together and go through so many different experiences,” she said. “That challenges both you and the dogs, and it creates a very tight bond.”

Laura wants to keep racing and raising sled dogs her whole life. But right now, she’s focused on learning as much as she can and pursuing her dream of running the Iditarod.

“The feeling towards the end of a distance race is pretty awesome — you feel like you can do anything with that dog team,” she said. “They are over too fast. I just want to keep experiencing the trail and the challenges.”

ajeffries@newarkadvocate.com

740-328-8544

Twitter: @amsjeffries