A few people have been surprised by this business of having to train a dog to run. Don't they just naturally run & run & run, ever so happily? Dogs, of course, do like to run, but they're designed for short sprints, not distance running. If you want to run distances with your dog, you have to train her up, same as you would do for yourself.
Also, when you go jogging, the idea is obviously that you do actually want to sustain a certain speed for a certain length of time -- you don't stop every ten feet to look at something or sniff a tree trunk. So you have to teach them that, too.
This dog specifically has knee issues that I need to be careful to consider, as well -- not taking the time to build up the strength of her muscles & tendons will lead nowhere good.
And she is also lazy. She would literally sleep in until noon every day if we let her.
Our vet & dog trainers have all been very stern with me about starting very slowly. I'm not sure if they think I'm a marathoner or something, but the reality is that I'm not built for distance running either. In fact, I hate running. But I think Zoey is very cute when she runs, so I'm counting on that to sustain me.
On Monday I tried doing a jog-a-block/walk-a-block/jog-a-block thing for a few minutes. I had fun peeking at her cute floppy ears as we went, & she seemed to have a lot of fun trotting along there. In fact, for probably the first time ever, she wasn't ready to go back home after 20 minutes out in the neighborhood. She's from the Mojave desert, & has only been in the city for a year, so she usually gets overwhelmed by all the city sights & sounds pretty quickly. One of our dog trainers told me that some nervous dogs like running, because they have less time to get worked up about scary things they see along the way. Seems like it might be true for her, because she was still excited to be out there after half an hour.
It's all very encouraging! On to the project!
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