And they call it Puppy Love

Ah, New York.  Land of frigid temperatures and, well, that’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. I have only one goal over the next two days, and that is to figure out how to get to Madison Square Garden from my hotel and maybe see some dogs. The rest is just gravy.

Yesterday was fun. I woke up at 6 to take Brody to the Helen Woodward Puppy Love 5K, and about 5 minutes after I left the house it started drizzling. 5 minutes after that, it was pouring. Now, I looked up the weather report that morning and it mentioned nothing about such drenching debauchery, so I had found myself leaving the house with absolutely nothing that would protect me from a long wet run, no hat, no windbreaker. Things were not looking good. 

The entire county was getting drenched. I pulled up to Del Mar, where the run was starting, and found that the one teeny little section of coast where they were having the run was actually clear. It was like Helen Woodward president Mike Arms looked up to the sky, waggled his finger, and the clouds obediently dissipated in just that one 3 square mile section of San Diego. (I have no doubt he could accomplish this. He is a force of nature.)

I was concerned Team Iams might see this inclement weather and send me apologetic texts that morning, but everyone who was planning on coming made it. Our team had already been suffering from some unfortunate setbacks; Heather from Iams had an emergency and was unable to attend; Leah, she of amazing motivation, was running another 5K the day before and injured herself; Tasha’s dog broke her foot; Karen broke her toe.

Between all of us, we were down to three people and two dogs.  But that’s life, right? Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t, and you just press on and do the best with what you have, when you have it. Being the only person on the team who showed up with both dog and human injury-free, I promptly stepped into a pothole and twisted my ankle about 10 feet into the race, just to kind of fit in, I guess. I didn’t want to feel left out.

I didn’t really race, anyway, as much as I did “leisurely stroll”. There were 2 separate courses, one for runners and one for walkers. I decided to hang out with my friends and walk. The vast majority of participants were walkers, so there was much better dog viewing on this half of the course anyway.

Did I say dog? There were pigs too.

In the race materials, they did make sure to let people know that the full loop was only 2.5 K, so in order to complete the full 5K you needed to turn around and do the course twice. We finished the first loop, saw a bunch of people heading for the finish line, and just followed them, figuring we would then get routed back onto the course.

“CONGRATULATIONS!” said the peppy volunteers pressing a banana into my hands like I had just done a 26.2. “Turn in your chip?”

Now at this point we had walked about, what’s that, maybe a mile and a half? I hadn’t even broken a sweat. Brody was barely warmed up. So, because Team Iams is HARDCORE y’all, we turned around and did the course again. I think there were maybe 10 other people who followed suit.  I just couldn’t justify getting up that early for a one and a half mile walk, though if the rain had continued I might have thrown the towel in early too.

By the time we finished our second loop, the finish line was already being taken down and everyone had moved on into the market place, where there were booths, agility demonstrations, and doga. I’m kind of sad I had to miss doga but at least I got to watch it for a few minutes.

As far as I can tell, doga consists of you doing yoga and your dog practicing his or her stay, by the way. Not that that is a bad thing. Dogs need that kind of practice too.

Yee haw! There were some killer agility demonstrations too.

So nice to live in a dog friendly hood.