DAWSON CITY The front-runners of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog race say it's going to be near-impossible for anyone to beat Alaskan Lance Mackey.

'It's a piece of cake for him from now on,' said veteran racer William Kleedehn. 'Other than if Lance runs into certain problems, we'll have a very tough time to try to catch up.'

Mackey arrived at the Dawson halfway point at 11:35 p.m. Tuesday. His arrival is almost four hours ahead of Kleedehn, who arrived second at 3:33 a.m. Wednesday.

Mackey could still run into problems along the trail, said Kleedehn.

There are 883 kilometres remaining of the 1,600-km race, but for anyone else to catch him, he's going to have to have some pretty 'bum runs', said third-place arrival Gerry Willomitzer.

'A four-hour lead is almost the length of a run,' said Willomitzer, who arrived at the 36-hour layover at 4:40 a.m. Tuesday. 'He'll be hard to beat if things go the way they've gone for him. He's got an amazing team. A team like that deserves to win.'

Mackey, who claims to be full of 'tricks', is seemingly able to run and rest his dogs to any schedule, said Willomitzer.

'I don't think I have a team like Lance Mackey where I can just run anything. Any length of run, combined with any length of break, mixed up whichever way,' he said.

Willomitzer added that Mackey likes to leave checkpoints just as his closest competitors are arriving.

'That's demoralizing for the other guy,' he said. 'Mackey likes to do that for a lot of guys. When I came through Pelly, he just walked out the door. He wants you to know that he's right on your heels or that he's got a jump.'

Willomitzer said Kleedehn is likely the only team that may be able to close the gap at this point.

But the Carcross-area musher said he doesn't plan on pushing his team to try to steal the title from Mackey, who has won the last two Quests.

'If you try to beat the number one team or if you want to finish first and you're only a team that can actually finish third, you will finish 10th,' said Kleedehn. 'I came in second into here, but that doesn't mean I think that I have a good chance of finishing second.'

Kleedehn said he is currently rebuilding his team and an injury early in the season forced him to leave his strongest lead dog at home.

This year, he said, his goal is to finish in the top five. It is Kleedehn's 11th Quest. His highest placing was in 2005, when he finished in second place just eight minutes behind Mackey.

But Willomitzer said a team may just be able to pull that off again, and possibly win, if the musher is able to keep his dogs together, have a few good runs and slowly close the gap.

Three-time champion Hans Gatt, though, said he is expecting to soon be sharing the title of a musher who has won the race three times consecutively.

He isn't expecting to make a come-back from his fifth position at the arrival into the halfway checkpoint.

'I knew that winning the race this year would have been kind of a surprise, because I did not put my best team into this race,' said Gatt.

He is also running the Iditarod this year and is using his younger dogs for that race. His team, which was being run on the Quest 300 race by Thomas Tetz, easily won when the 408-kilometre journey was only being treated as a training run.

The dogs Gatt selected for the Quest are older canines, he said, many of them veterans of the race.

He said he had to make compromises in who he put on each team, because he didn't want the dogs running in both races.

'It wasn't all that important to me to win the Quest again,' he said.

Willomitzer said the race has been on since day one, when the teams left the Whitehorse starting line last Saturday.

Mackey's 36-hour and 59-minute run from Pelly Crossing to Dawson just shows how much faster the race is getting each year, he added.

All of the front of the pack teams were arriving into the town approximately nine hours earlier than they did in the 2005 run.

'You've got to be cutting rest some time and you've got to race into Dawson,' said Willomitzer. 'We're pushing the race now every year.'

If the speed keeps up, he said, in theory teams should be rolling into Fairbanks at around the 10-day mark.

Mackey pulled out of Dawson at 12:23 this afternoon.

He was to be followed by Kleedehn at 4:45 p.m., Willomitzer at 5:07 p.m., Hugh Neff at 5:40 p.m. and Gatt at 6:48 p.m.