Jackie – Great job on the run and GymStyles!
LaDonna – Congrats on your half! Good job! That is a wonderful time!
Shelly – I’ll bet you are getting excited for Philly! Yay! I really hope we do get to run together some time!
I know the following is really long! Sorry! I tried to keep it as short as I could, though.
The route we ran yesterday is the same route that we ran when all the dogs chased us. Remember my encounter with the “devil dog”
This route is on a rural country road. We were both armed with our pepper spray. There were countless dogs that growled, barked and chased us, and of course the “devil dog” came after us again. He got a spray…but it didn’t get him, but he must have gotten it before, because he backed up and left us alone.
Around five miles into the run, we heard dogs barking in a yard that was off to our right. We never could see them, but we were armed and ready! When we turned our heads/eyes back forward, standing directly in front of us was a black pit bull. I am petrified of pit bulls after hearing all the “horror” stories. I know that there are a lot of friendly ones, and it basically depends on how they have been trained. …and I definitely did not know how this one would be. We were petrified and pointed our spray to get ready. The dog kind of hunkered down and wagged her tail timidly. We were still cautious, even at that point, but we were pretty sure that she would not hurt us. She came and we petted her. And that was the start of a wonderful, but also heartbreaking run.
We tried to get her to go “home”. We weren’t sure really where she lived because she just kind of appeared when we had our head turned. She took off running with us and she literally scoped out all the houses and barking dogs. Then she would look back at us to make sure we were still coming and okay. There were tons of dogs that would come growling and barking towards us and her. Never once, I cannot stress this enough….not one time did that dog bark, growl or make a peep. The fur on her back would raise, but she never made an aggressive move towards any dog, person, cat…or anything. She would get between the dogs that were coming after us and stand there with her scruff raised and not make a peep. When Patty and I were past….she would come and catch up with us and again lead us, scoping out things.
She ran with us for 18 miles. I never knew a dog could keep up a pace for that long. We made a pit stop at the vehicle to get some more “fuel”. I had a bag of ice in my cooler. I poured it out for her and she ate and licked some of it and then laid down on top of it. When we took off again, she was ready to go. We could definitely tell the poor thing was losing her “pep”, though…but she kept at it!
Going back around the loop again, we tried to find out who she belonged to, but everyone said they had never seen her before and thought someone had dropped her off. We asked several people to hold her until we could get a good distance away, hoping she would go “home” …but she would always catch up with us.
We were trying to figure out how on earth we were going to get in the vehicle and leave, because that would be a more heavily trafficked area. We finally decided that I would keep running with her on the other side of the river and Patty would run back to the car (a mile or so back) and then she would pick me up and we would have to leave her. That is what we did and it broke my heart to see the poor little thing running as hard as she could to try to catch us in the car.
I hope you guys don’t think I am nuts, but I am having a really hard time trying to keep from crying about that dog. I hope and pray that she really did have a home. I have never before “met” a sweeter, more loving dog in my life. The thing that really gets us is the fact that she never made the slightest sound! We’ve been calling her the “angel dog”.
