Nome Serum Run: Race Against Death | Togo’s Descendants | 4

Against The Odds

Wondery

Cassie De Pecol, History, Society & Culture, Dolby, Mike Corey, Dolby Atmos, Atmos

4.7 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In honor of the 100-year anniversary of the Nome Serum Run, Maine musher Jonathan Nathaniel Hayes is recreating the run. And he’s doing it with a team descended directly from Leonhard Seppala’s original dogs. Today, Hayes joins host Mike Corey to talk about the inspiration and preparations to travel hundreds of frozen miles across Alaska. Hayes is the author of The True Tails of Togo the Sled Dog!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Against the Odds early and ad-free right now.
0:05.6	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:09.6	A quick note, at the end of today's episode, we'll be joined by the folks from Amazon Books
0:14.2	who will be sharing their recommendations for fans of Against the Odds.
0:59.6	From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. Musher Leonard Sepulah and his dog team led by Togo made the longest part of the grueling trip from Ninana to Nome in the winter of 1925. Despite life-threatening conditions,
1:06.5	with temperatures well below minus 40, his team helped deliver diphtheria antitoxin to save the children of
1:13.1	Nome. A hundred years later, in honor of the 100-year anniversary, Musher Jonathan Nathaniel Hayes
1:20.5	is going to recreate the Nome serum run from Nenana to Nome, with a team of dogs descended from
1:27.2	Togo and the original team.
1:29.6	Hayes is the owner of the Maine-based Poland Spring Sepulah kennels, which breeds the registered
1:35.1	descendants. He calls himself Chief Pooper Scooper, and he's also a retired Marine, a high school
1:41.3	biology teacher, and a preacher. It's a little bit of a jigsaw puzzle,
1:45.2	how Leonard Sepulah got from Alaska to Maine, and how Hayes came to mush with Togo's descendants,
1:50.8	but we'll explain. Jonathan Nathaniel Hayes, welcome to Against the Odds. It's great to be here. Thanks for
1:57.2	having me. We'll get into the whole backstory of how you got into this. But first,
2:01.8	I want to talk about how you're getting ready to recreate the 600-mile-plus gnome serum run.
2:08.6	I'd love if you could describe training for such a large undertaking. So we start with two-mile runs.
2:15.8	We do six of those, and then we do six, four-mile runs, and then six, eight-mile runs, and so on and so forth.
2:22.8	The typical run is we'll get to the kennel, and I'll hydrate the dogs right away.
2:27.4	And then the moment we pull out the gear, I have to put some music in my head because the cacophony of noise when the dogs see the gear coming out, the harnesses, they just get so pumped and so excited that I have to put earphones in.
2:41.7	And, you know, a typical training run, I've got a story where our team was attacked for 45 minutes by a moose and we had to put it down.
2:49.5	And another time on the lake, six of my eight dogs broke the gang line and I ended up mushing
	...

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