My running goes to the dogs
March 30th, 2009Does anyone else my age have senior moments? Exhibit A: my phone and my stapler are both black, skinny and rectangular. Only one of them rings but I often find myself trying to answer the stapler. Exhibit B: I just spent 5 minutes trying to reset my mp3 player (which shorted out today at the gym) by poking what I thought was the reset button with a series of mechanical pencils, paper clips and the blunt end of a sewing needle. Turns out that was the microphone (emphasis on “was” – it may not cooperate from here on after the poking).
But enough about my early-onset mental degeneration. Today’s post was meant to be on last week’s canine run. I spent last week at my parents’ house babysitting their “retirement” dogs (translation: they’re used to having someone let them in and out whenever they please). This I thought would be the perfect opportunity to go running with a dog. I don’t get the chance to run with animals very often (cats can’t keep up on a leash and they don’t like being stuffed into backpacks). But which dog should I choose? My parents have two.
Dog #1: Martha. An 8-year-old Old English Sheepdog (really more of a middle-aged Canad
ian sheepdog). We got her when I had just finished high school and I had my one-and-only summer off. This is the reason my mother blames me for her…disposition. An example is in order here. My parents used to have another sheepdog named Quincy. Both regularly went for visits to the dog groomer. Some time after Quincy passed away last fall, my parents took Martha in for her winter trim. The salon asked them not to bring Martha back again. My parents offered to slip some tranquilizer into her kibble. No dice said the salon. Apparently they only put up with her antics on the grooming table (growling, snapping, kicking, thrashing, snarling) because the other one was so pleasant (the irony is they later sent a sympathy card to my parents for Quincy. Very tactfully, they didn’t include a postscript reminder that Martha was still banned).
But I decided against dog #1, not because of her personality (which is very sweet with people not trying to groom her) but because she’s gotten a little “fluffy”. And by “fluffy”, I mean when she tries to jump up to greet you, she can barely get her front legs off the ground. She started dragging at the end of a 1 mile walk. Running her would have been cruel. This left only…
Dog #2: Brie. Actually, it doesn’t really matter what you call her, she won’t come anyway. It’s not that she’s poorly behaved (no further comments here – my Mum reads the blog) but she’s deaf as a post. And not in the way that all dogs are deaf: she literally can’t here anything. You could call her Brie or Spot or Ralph or Dishtowel, she wouldn’t hear it. Incidentally, she’s a 3-year-old Boxer my Mum got from Boxer Rescue Ontario (they do exactly what the name suggests, except the boxers come from all over North America).
Unlike Martha, Brie is in pretty good shape thanks to her nightly laser training (my Dad takes her outside and she chases the light from a laser pointer) and her bird-shadow chasing (she chases the shadows of birds along the ground). So I snapped a leash on her and off we went.
The first problem happened about 5 minutes in. It was dark so I had put some reflective tape around my arm and a flashing light on Brie’s collar. The light came off in the dark but I swear it didn’t bounce one before Brie picked it up. Her cheek started flashing like Rudolph’s nose. With some difficulty, I managed to pry it out of her jaws and decided to just shove it in my pocket for the time being.
From then on, everything was pretty much smooth sailing. I found it was nice having the company, even if it was pretty quiet. There was something really motivating about having her run beside me. The motion of an animal running is almost poetic. When you watch an animal run – any animal – you can tell that they were built for it – muscles, joints, tendons all moving in total harmony. It seems almost effortless. In my dreams, I can run like that. Clearly, I never will but having her run beside me was a very soothing experience and the run felt just a bit easier than usual.
I was worried about overdoing it because Brie is mostly an interval kind of dog. I obviously underestimated the beast as she tried to introduce some plyometrics training into the last lap: she kept jumping up to grab the leash from my hand. I decided I didn’t need the upper body workout at this point (from dragging the leash back) and so we headed home. I would say this was a very successful run. I even had visions of getting myself a dog so we could run together. Until the next morning, when she woke me up at 7:30am (very early for this grad student) so she could go outside, eat breakfast and then nap for the rest of the morning. I was reminded at that point why I have cats.
Tags: running experiment
