Rainy Days... Continued

I'm amazed at the power of blog dumping. I couldn't get The Carpenter's song "Rainy Days and Mondays" out of my head, and for some reason posting the video on yesterday's blog purged the song from my mind.

Of course mentioning it again here might cause the music loop to restart, but let me go on as if that's not going to happen.

Thanks to this odyssey into "Purgeville" yesterday, I was unable to stay focused on the topic at hand: running in the rain. In fact, I don't think I even mentioned running until the end of the blog.

So, before I ramble on about thoughts in my head that have nothing to do with running in the rain, without further adieu I bring you today's blog.

(Geez, what a bunch of babble already. It is like I swallowed a philosophy book or something.)

I try to run with my dog at least 4 times a week... or 3 times if I need a sleep-in day... or 2 times if one of my kids has a rough night... or one time if I decide to do some housework. It is all about my priorities.

This week my priority is exercise (unless one of the other conditions listed above changes the aforementioned priority).

I was convinced that I would open the door to a downpour outside. The weather report had mentioned that we were in for 3 rain storms coming our way - back to back. The first two storms were fairly uneventful. We had some wind, we had some rain, and we had a little bit of hail. There were moments that the rain was so intense it reminded me of Texas weather.

However, when I opened the door outside to go running yesterday, the ground was wet, but the sky was mostly clear. Sure there were a few grayish clouds in the sky, but they were small and moving overhead quickly.

I grabbed the dog, hooked on his leash, and outside we went! The first 5 minutes of the walk are always the same. If you are a dog owner, you know that there are certain spots in your neighborhood your dog MUST STOP and sniff or apparently the world will collapse.

There is a lot of leash pulling by me during this time.

After we've walked a little and warmed our muscles up, we begin running. My dog is from a shelter, but I don't think that has anything to do with his stubborn and anxious personality. If there is one item that is suddenly present on the sidewalk or near it that wasn't there before, my dog will treat it like it is a ferocious beast.

One time there was a bunch of temporary NO PARKING signs that lined up our street, and I thought my dog was going to lose all of his hair. We had to stop at each sign to verify that it was in fact NOT a ferocious beast before he would relax. Why he wasn't able to extrapolate that if one sign isn't a ferocious beast then they ALL were NOT ferocious beasts, I will never know.

The other thing that freaks out my dog during our run is if someone's automatic sprinkler system turns on or off. I think it has something to do with the hissing noise they make before water is present that freaks him out. There's really nothing I can do about that. I can't have him sniff the sprinkler, so I try to reassure him that the sprinkler is in fact NOT a ferocious beast.

This solution is sometimes successful.

Now, back to yesterday morning's run. We were having a great time - no added signs, no sprinklers turning on or off, and certainly no other items that could have been mistaken for a ferocious beast.

Then it started to rain.

Well, that was pretty funny. My dog actually slowed his running pace to look up at me. His expression seemed to say, "Why are we running through this sprinkler system?" I had to give his leash a tug or two to keep him moving. Then, the sky opened up and the pleasant drizzle turned into a downpour, and we were immediately drenched.

My dog stopped looking at me. He stopped slowing down. In fact, he stopped noticing anything around him after that. We had the most pleasant run ever because he was so focused on how miserable he was in the rain he didn't have the attention span to notice our surroundings.

I hate to say it, but I had THE BEST RUN EVER that day. Maybe I should carry around a spritz bottle to use on him...?

Poor puppy.