“Look at you, Madonna.” The sled dog was standing up, looking back at her master, rousing herself from the rest she got on the warm straw. The dog next to her stood up too.

            They were ready to run.

            Their eyes followed Brent Sass, the 27-year-old rookie, taking cues from his actions, waiting for a command. Sass was walking back and forth on the crunchy snow. It was around 4:30 a.m. and 45-below-zero at Circle City, which is a village of roughly 500 on the Yukon River.

            Sass unhooked a dog and moved it to a different part of the tug-line. Soon, every dog was standing.

            “Man, you guys are ready to go,” the photographer from his kennel support team said.

            “You guys know the drill, don’t ya,” Sass’s dad said, looking over the team.

            Different mushers run the Yukon Quest for different reasons. Sometimes the reason for running the race changes during the 1000-mile journey, sometimes the reason becomes bigger. Twenty-one mushers were on their way to Fairbanks in the early morning hours of Feb. 19, spanning six checkpoints or re-supply stations. On that night, 500 miles separated the eventual winner, Lance Mackey from the Red Lantern holder, Bob McAlpin.

            Brent Sass was in the middle of the pack.

            Having won the Quest 300 the previous year, Sass’s reason for racing in 2007 was to take his team down the full distance on the whole Yukon Quest trail. What started out as a let’s-do-this-and-have-fun trip eventually turned into a tribute to a fellow companion.

            “He went 700 miles with me and did a really good job,” Sass said of Melville, a dog who died before reaching Slaven’s Cabin, the checkpoint 60 miles before Circle City. “He gave it his all.”

            No longer snug on Melville’s neck, his old collar hung on the sled. It gave motivation to a musher who was still dealing with emotional outfall.

            “Melville’s death was definitely the hardest, worst thing that happened along the way,” Sass said while getting his team ready. “These guys deserve to finish, and I do too,” he added. This was reason enough to keep Sass going.

            Twenty-one mushers were either on the trail or at a checkpoint like Sass, in this last chapter of the 1,000-mile race. For him, there was roughly 300 miles to go.

            For Russ Bybee, a 40-year-old rookie from Willow, simply seeing what’s around the bend kept him moving down the trail to the finish.

            “We only went to the top of Eagle Summit,” Bybee said of last year’s race. “Went and looked over the edge and said ‘No, I’m not doing that.’”

            Bybee was one of seven mushers airlifted by helicopters from Eagle Summit during a snowstorm in the 2006 Yukon Quest. This year marked his second attempt.

            Just finishing the race this year was his major motivation.

            “Let’s get ‘er done,” Bybee said while checking his dogs’ feet before leaving Circle City. “Let’s get up and over it.”

            Bybee successfully made it over Eagle Summit and eventually finished in the prize money, pocketing $5,000. He crossed the finish line on the Chena River in Fairbanks in 13th place out of the 21 finishers.

            Farther down the trail, Michelle Phillips, a mother and veteran Quest musher from Whitehorse, Yukon had a rough crossing at the same place Bybee left the race last year. The struggle over the 3,650-foot mountain made her all the more relieved to arrive at the Chena Hot Springs checkpoint. As the night grew longer and the temperature hovered around 40-below-zero, she expressed appreciation for the simple things in life.

            “I’m just happy I’m alive. I’m not dead. I’m not starving. I don’t have cancer. I have a great family. I have a good life and I’m just happy to be alive,” said Phillips at midnight as she got her sled and dogs ready for the departure on the 100-mile sprint into the Fairbanks finish. For her, it seemed being alive was reason enough to keep moving.

            Bob McAlpin, a rookie, wanted to finish the race with a strong team. Like Sass, McAlpin ran the Yukon Quest 300 and wanted to see the rest of the 1,000-mile trail.

            Being a seasoned backcountry traveler with more than 30 years of experience driving dogs in the north, McAlpin wasn’t overly concerned being in the back of the pack. By his reckoning, he was doing fine. He hadn’t dropped a single dog from his team; a claim no other musher in the 2007 Quest could still make. No, tackling the Yukon alone while not preferrable, didn’t intimidate the driver firmly positioned to claim the Red Lantern awaiting the 2007 Quest’s last-place finisher.

            “You start thinking about the whole thing and it gets overwhelming. You just have to look at it a little bit at a time,” he explained later. “You say, ‘OK, I’m going another two hours.’ You don’t look past the next place you’re going to stop.”

            Then there’s the two-time defending champion, Lance Mackey.

            Mackey knew people thought he got lucky winning back-to-back Quests. Winning the 2007 Yukon Quest showed the skeptics that he had the drive, skill and determination to win. Not just luck.

            “I like to prove those people wrong,” he said. That thought has become a theme in his life. In 2001, Mackey was diagnosed with cancer and he said the doctors told him he would never race again. He proved them wrong too. Mackey not only races -- he became the first musher to win the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod in the same year.

            In that spirit, Mackey proclaimed that in the next few years, he will strive to become the first musher to win five Yukon Quests in row. Again, the skeptics can say what they want. Their words seem to be the fuel in Mackey’s fire.

            Mackey also said the purse was a major motivation for the race. Last year, he won $30,000 for being the first to finish in Whitehorse, Yukon. This year, the purse for the first place was $40,000. The father of four said most mushers don’t have a real job or major sponsors, so the extra $10,000 was a huge reason to work hard.

“I love this race and I love the dogs,” Mackey said. That reason is one shared by most.

Extreme reporters Rosie Milligan, Brian O’Donoghue contributed to this story.