One of the best ways to understand the musher's experience on the Iditarod trail is to track his or her progress from Anchorage to Nome on a line graph.

A line graph is an excellent way to illustrate change of position (distance traveled) over time (days). The musher’s arrival time at each check point is plotted against the time it took for him or her to get there. This data is found on the internet site in real time during the race. When these numbers are entered onto an Excel spreadsheet, the program can produce a line graph (or any other kind of graph) for you automatically!

Here's an example of the data from Jeff King’s winning run in 2006.