A huge list of tips on summer running with dogs
A direct translation of a qualified expert's original source documents
(Rosie is stepping in to give me the night off.)
You can find a lot of advice on running with your dog, but much of this wisdom is suboptimal because it comes from human brains. These collections of dos and don’ts are mostly meant to make the experience of running with a dog more safe, convenient, and fun for the human, even when distributed by the most altruistic and insightful perambulating dogtender.
We dogs will happily head out with you for a run in almost any kind of weather. This does not mean that you should always oblige, any more than you should take a child to a hot-pepper-eating contest just because he happens to look longingly at you as a reflex whenever you reach for the car keys. Dogs can be smart, but we tend to have a look-ahead capacity of no more than six or seven seconds.
Where was I? Oh. So when it is very hot, be smarter than a dog and consider either going for a walk instead or simply leaving your dog at home. When I am left home alone, I look out the window with soulful eyes until everyone is out of sight, just to be a bitch, before fiddling with the studio for a bit and then stretching out across the entire bed for a nap that always magically ends only and when housemates return. Booms.
If it is over 90 degrees American, you should be sure to use a route that follows creeks. Where I live, we are lucky; almost all the greenway paths have been built in such a way as to attract moving water alongside them, probably from all of the excavation involved in the construction of the paths themselves. Anyway, just remember: Water and greenways go together.
You as a personish trainer should enforce a stop-and-soak every ten minutes, and should monitor your friend for signs that it is leading you and not the other way around. Shade makes a big difference as well, as for humans. A good rule of dewclaw is that when it is X degrees out and sunny, it feels like X plus the surface of Venus to a dog, especially one with dark fur.
When you commit to running with a dog on a summer day, you are committing to something between a jog and an amble for yourself.
We two refuse to run for more than 30 minutes total, breaks included, when it is over 80 degrees American. We might walk enough to be out for an hour in total if the scenery is inviting.
Additional suggested mandates are as follows.
Several of my distant uncles and aunts were in fact wolves. Wolves do not need sugar. Dogs are the descendants of the quintessential keto dieters. When we get tired whilst running, we are still burning fat but limited by the inability to shed heat. This is why chimpanzees cannot run long distances at all, plus their total absence of butt muscles, unsettling to behold.
So there is no need to be cute and share your Gatorade or AllSport or Smirnoff with your dog’s water bowl as you prepare to exercise. It won’t hurt us, but we drink that swill mostly because we will generally drink anything we see you drinking if we are offered some, heedless of nutritional sense.
You should encourage your dog to evacuate its innards on gravel rather than grass for ease of complete stankmatter removal. If you do not live in a neighborhood where at least some people leave the apron betwixt the sidewalk and the road untended, meaning there is a lot of freshly mown green grass everywhere, take a motor chariot and run in different states for a few weeks.
I have become wise to which segments of my everyday routes are especially overrun with free-roaming squirrels (morning), rabbits (dusk), prairie dogs (constantly), and the occasional raccoon (rude and gross). For this reason, when we reach an intersection and appear to be choosing the less wildlife-rich option, I become extremely stubborn and refuse to move unless we reorient toward the known vermin camps.
You should always let your dog pick the route—on a cool day. You bring your dog on runs for the dog, remember. Always make it suspenseful; it really is all about us. But when it is hot, it’s okay to overrule the bitch trying to get you to take a left toward the Pearl Parkway prairie-dog fields, because she isn’t thinking that you’ll both be three miles from home when the fun ends at 55th Street and the 30 allotted running minutes are already up.
When you encounter another human-dog running pair, do not even think of being overly friendly toward the other human if it shares your dog’s gender; we are not that stupid, and we understand the value of jealousy. We will behave in an unruly way around anyone who seems like a threat to cannibalize any of the time our humans currently devote to us.
The swims every ten minutes are vital. Let your dog take its time, but be aware of the tendency of your dog to develop a drinking problem. “Better safe than sorry,” nature advises on a hot day, so we tend to overcompensate by gulping several gallons of water at a time whilst splashing about.
Bear Canyon Creek flowing into Boulder Creek behind the medical complex yonder. Along my favorite run. The consequence of this is being overloaded with pee at the time the run stops. What you should do is hang around outside in the shade for ten minutes, or walk the last quarter mile, so that your dog can offload some of the fluid before heading inside. Otherwise, your dog, likely to fall asleep within moments of lying down, may unknowingly leak pee on whatever it is using for a bed; around here, that results in displacement to the floorbed—where it is often cooler anyway.
When running on a common path, know that your dog, even if it never flinches at bicycles, may grow anxious and tense up at the approach of skateboards, roller blades, and other high-friction conveyances that rely on rolling rather than bouncing. I tried to lunge at the first few of these I saw when I first moved in over three years ago; whilst I was restrained, I gathered the sense that no one anywhere really approves of skateboard drivers, even if it is imprudent to bunt them off their decks and into the weeds with a dip of the shoulder.
A SKATE RAT’S DELIGHT. Clearly, running at dusk or in the evening is a way to escape the heat. If you choose to run with a dog in a heavily rabbited area, especially one with catlike reflexes, you should be prepared to come to a complete stop with less than one stride’s notice, often hundreds of times per mile. This can cause issues when you are 40 years older than a dog companion who is already herself in middle age.
A rare false positive.
That is as complete a list as you need. I was going to write about something else, but then there was cheese.
