How to make yourself feel like a total ass

I seriously ought to write a book on the subject.  I consider myself a fairly intelligent fellow, but occasionally I impress myself with my stupidity and lack of foresight.

Allow me to explain myself.  I have, what I believe to be the cutest dog on earth.  

Jeff is an exceptionally intelligent Mutt with a love of children and a fearful hatred of skateboards.  In short, he's everything you hope you get when you adopt a dog on a whim, which is what we did.  My wife routinely teaches him tricks and he's liable to learn them in under fifteen minutes (it’s been done repeatedly).  He’s also incredibly energetic with boundless energy once he is outdoors, but somehow seems to mellow when he gets inside and very seldom causes a stir unless he’s been absolutely neglected in terms of attention.

Occasionally I take him running.  Most of the time I do not.  Many of my runs are 10 miles or more and I often wonder if he’ll overheat or just generally get in the way; he also have very little in the way of  “car awareness” and I’m constantly concerned he’ll get himself killed.  Most of the roads here in Monterey have very small shoulders and therefore this limits where I can take him when I run from my house.

Yesterday though, the plan was to head out to Laguna Seca and hit some trails for a run of about eight miles or so.  This, I figured, was a perfect chance to take Jeffy out for a little run.  He’d been stuck at a friend’s house while we were in LA over the weekend and I thought it’d be good to get him out of the house and under some open sky and onto some dirt.  I’ve taken him on some 7 milers before and I thought this would be a nice step up in mileage; even if we did 10 miles I wasn’t concerned from a conditioning standpoint.

The ship of expectations however, rapidly crashed ashore upon the rocks of reality when my partner and I realized that what looked like an eight mile loop was actually going to come out to roughly 10.5 miles.  Whoops.  The silver lining here was that it was not hot in the least.  There was a nice breeze despite the intermittent sun and I knew that Jeff wasn’t going to overheat.  I knew he was going to start feeling it past eight miles and that is exactly what happened.  What I did not realize however was the REASON for his slowdown.  Essentially he developed two large blisters on each of his largest pads; one of them popped and one did not.  Luckily he’s not a “licker” and has largely left them alone.  Today the plan is to wash his paws and gauze him up if necessary.  I think he’ll be fine, but I’m kicking myself for not considering this.  That being said, I grew up around hunting dogs and have never even seen this happen.  Of course, those were dogs that grew up on the dirt and in the sagebrush.  I took it for granted that he would be fine, and now I feel absolutely awful.

So here is my public apology to my loyal and trusting four-legged running partner.  I’m sorry dude and it won’t happen again

By Marcus with 3 comments