Keith Aili wins the 2023 John Beargrease Marathon title

 

Keith Aili was a happy man at the finish of the 39th running of the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon.

As he was being interviewed several hours later by the press, his wife and fellow musher Erin Aili stood near, a broad smile lighting up her face in the darkness. The Aili’s operate the Miles ahead Racing Kennel in Ray, Minnesota, raising and training Alaskan Huskies.

The musher from Ray, Minnesota, finished the 300-mile race in 52 hours and 58 minutes, about nine minutes ahead of last year’s winner, Ryan Anderson, who also won in 2011, 2015, and 2017.

The victory was never certain, Aili said. A veteran musher who has won many races with veteran teams, he was competing with a young group of dogs who mainly hadn’t raced before. He said that only one of his dogs had ever been on a team that ran in the Beargrease.

“I was running a young team, so I held them back for much of the race,” Aili said. “If you push a young team too hard too soon, they will go flat on you. At the halfway point, I was in about fifth place, and I know people thought I was out of the race. But after that, we picked up speed and started passing people.”

Keith and Erin Aili were all smiles at the finish line of the 40th John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon. Keith won the race by nine minutes over last year’s winner, Ryan Anderson, a four-time Beargrease champion. Aili last won the Beargrease in 2006. The race is named after John Beargrease, an Ojibwe musher who carried the mail between Two Harbors and Grand Marais, and occasionally all of the way to Grand Portage in the late nineteenth century. Staff photo Brian Larsen

Keith caught Ryan Anderson between Skyport Lodge and Mineral Center, the last checkpoint in the race. Aili had a 12-minute lead over Anderson at Mineral Center, and he didn’t waste any time at the checkpoint. His team crossed the line at the Grand Portage Lodge and Casino at 2:58 p.m., almost two hours faster than the GPS Tracker said he would finish.

“Yeah, I didn’t want to give Ryan a chance to catch me. So we booked out of Mineral Center and finished that last leg (31 miles) fast,” he said.

Aili finished with nine dogs out of the 12 he started with.

The last time Keith won the Beargrease was in 2006. His team finished that year with a time of 64 hours and 40 minutes. But the course changes, and the snow conditions are different every year. This year the track was fast, and the sub-zero temperatures were perfect for the dogs, so comparisons are hard to make.

As for Aili, who contemplated retirement from sled dog racing in 2018, this young team was vindication for his thirty-plus year as a sled dog racer, and one wonders how much better his young team will be when he doesn’t have to stand on the drag pad to slow them down for much of the race.