Petersburg's new Klondike Road Relay runners are "kind of a big dill"

Last weekend, a nine-person team from Petersburg - all of them Medical Center employees or relatives of employees - ran the 175-kilometer Klondike Road Relay from Skagway, Alaska, into Whitehorse, Yukon. And did it dressed, more or less, as pickles.

The team called itself "The Big Dills," and "oh my gosh, we had so much fun," said team captain Megan Litster.

The Klondike Road Relay is an overnight, 175-kilometer (roughly 110-mile) race that is broken into 10 legs of varying length, from about nine to 25 kilometers. Teams start in the evening and run straight through the night, finishing the next afternoon at the "Party in the Park" in Whitehorse.

How it came together

Litster first heard about the relay years ago from Jo Ann Day, and ran it for the first time last year with a friend from the Mat-Su Valley. She came home ready to field a team of her own.

"My office is right between Dr. [Alice] Hulebak and Kylie Watkins in the clinic, and I was talking about it, and both of them were like, 'We want to do it,'" Litster said. "Right then and there, we decided we were going to make a Petersburg Medical Center team."

The team was drawn from PMC employees and their first-degree relatives, spanning a range of departments. "We were representing a lot of different departments and different types of employees," Litster said. "That was pretty cool."

What's the dill with the pickle?

Every new hire at Petersburg Medical Center watches a series of training videos. One of them is "Give 'em the Pickle!," a well-worn customer-service video by Bob Farrell, founder of Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour. In it, Farrell tells the story of a customer irritated at being charged extra for pickles, and turns it into a mantra: when someone wants a pickle, just give them the pickle. The "pickles" are the small, extra things that make people feel cared for.

"Petersburg Medical Center has been showing this video for a lot of years," Litster said. "It does represent Petersburg Medical Center, right? Where we care about people."

When Litster delegated the team's tasks, she handed the naming job to PMC's Julie Walker, who came back with a batch of pickle puns. The winning pun: The Big Dills.

"I was skeptical, and then we just went all in with it," Litster said. Alice Wegener tracked down a costume; Phil Hofstetter turned up in pickle shorts and a bedazzled dill-pickle trucker hat. Emil Tucker - who doesn't work at PMC but whose daughter does - hauled a Costco-size jar of pickles the whole way, and when the team's final runner crossed the line, an announcer hoisted the jar overhead like a trophy.

The theme became a calling card. Along the road and after the finish, strangers kept greeting them the same way.

"We kept running into people who were like, 'You're a big dill. This is so fun,'" Litster said. Teammates shouted it to one another mid-leg, too: you're kind of a big dill.

Running all night

The race is not an easy run. Legs ran as long as 16 miles, much of it in the dark and the cold, and the course climbs almost the entire way out of Skagway.

Walker drew the short, steep leg straight up the pass. The northern lights were out over her head. She never saw them.

"There was apparently northern lights over my head, but I didn't see them because I was looking at my feet," Walker said, keeping her headlamp trained down on an uneven road shoulder to avoid rolling an ankle. Overnight it was cold enough that handoff stations kept small fires going; by the last legs the next day it was hot. "Our nighttime runners were fighting the cold," Walker said, "and our daytime runners were fighting the warmth."

The team crammed into a single support van that leapfrogged ahead of each runner. Hofstetter described it as a "chaos bus" - gear everywhere, teammates asleep on top of the bags, everyone running on little sleep. And, inevitably, pickles: the big jar spilled some of its juice along the way.

"We had a 24-hour period where we all smelled a little bit like pickles," Litster said. "Very appropriate."

The trip's most memorable wildlife sighting came on Hofstetter's leg - a 16-mile stretch descending into Carcross as the sun came up.

"As I'm coming down the hill, one of the volunteers from the race was on the side of the road," Hofstetter said. "She kind of yells at me, 'Hey, there's a grizzly bear, a sow, and two cubs up the road. We're trying to shoo them off.'"

Sleep-deprived and running hard, he just kept going. "I'm not going to stop running," he said. He never saw the bears - that night. The next day however, driving the route back to Skagway to catch the ferry, the team came upon a sow and two cubs at the exact spot, and stopped to take photos and video.

"I'm so glad I didn't have to run past them," Hofstetter said. "My brain was such a mush. I think I just would have been like, 'Huh, that's interesting.'"

'An annual thing'

For Hofstetter, the whole experience " was probably the most fun I've had in a long time," he said, crediting Litster with the logistics and casting himself as a willing "tag-along." "Meg was the team captain. She led the group."

Petersburg has sent runners to the Klondike over the years - Walker named longtime local runners Mary Clemens, Marlene Cushing and Ginger Evens - but it had been a while since the town fielded its own team, with locals more often joining other rosters. Roughly half the Big Dills were running the relay for the first time.

And by every account, they intend to be back. Runners were already claiming legs for next year before they got home.

"We might have an annual thing going on here," Hofstetter said.