That's how my run with my greyhound Django went: Run, stop, sniff, pee (him, not me, for the last two). I took him right after work yesterday, and we ran one mile on the Northside river trail. The first half was a lot of run-stop-sniff-pee intervals, but he did much better with continuous running in the second half.
To be fair, right after work is his potty walk, so he is used to reading pee mail and doing his business then. I think I should have done a longer potty walk prior to the run to let him get it out of his system, but with the days so short now I wanted to get our run in before it got dark.
Toward the end, he looked up at me while we were running and started doing zoomies. Zoomies is a greyhound thing, which basically means they go crazy and run around in circles like the Tasmanian Devil. That lasts for about a minute or so before they revert back to their 45-mph-couch-potato nature. (Greyhounds are actually very low energy dogs and after quick bursts of energy are lazy bones.) So on the trail, Django started doing zoomies and running around in circles around me, which meant I had to turn around in circles so he wouldn't get strangled on his leash. Good thing no one else was around, because we must have looked crazy, plus I was laughing my head off. He cracks me up!
I took his zoomies to mean, "Hey, running is fun! Let's go faster!" So I broke out into a sprint...and Django was able to do a very slow run. He usually trots when I run and gets nowhere near a real run himself. He seemed to like my sprint but not for long because he stopped after about 15 seconds. I got him to run at a trot for the remainder of the one mile.
I'm making another goal to try to run at least once a week with him this winter, at least when the weather is decent. The ultimate goal is to run the full Turkey Trot 5K with him next year.
I didn't get any pictures running with him, but here's one of the outtakes from a photo shoot for our holiday card two years ago.
Labels: django, running with Django
