Run, Puppers, Run

This evening was only our third biking adventure and Boss Lady is already upping the ante. And she’s not following the rules. Generally, when you are perfecting a behavior you increase expectations for only one aspect of the behavior at a time: duration, speed, accuracy, etc. Boss Lady knows this rule, she’s just ignoring it. Tonite she increased both speed and distance. We biked twice as far, and we biked quite a bit faster. Neither of which further endeared me to biking.

Let me explain a few of my complaints against biking. 1. There is no sniffing involved. Even when we’re walking, despite the fact that I’m not allowed to lolly-gag, I have plenty of opportunities to sniff. Not while biking, though. While biking I am running (or trotting, as is more often the case) and it is quite difficult to sniff while running. 2. There is no peeing involved. I’ve been living in this town for several years now, and I’ve been traversing it’s streets and sidewalks for just as long. I’ve gotten to know lots of the other local pups through pee-mail. We leave messages for each other on strategic objects. While Boss Lady only allows extended pee-mails in a few places, I am certainly able to leave short messages in many, many places while we’re walking. When biking neither long nor short messages are possible. Let me put this succintly: I need to pee on things to make sure other dogs don’t forget I exist. 3. I cannot look at other dogs. Boss Lady doesn’t allow it. No, sir, she said, don’t be looking at other dogs while we’re biking. In fact, she continued, don’t even think about looking at other dogs. And that Boss Lady, she knows when you’re thinking about looking at another dog. Trust me, you don’t want her to have to tell you to stop thinking about another dog. It’s not fun. 4. It involves a bike. As I’ve already stated, I don’t like bikes. Nothing involving a bike is enjoyable.

Now that I’ve made transparent my feelings regarding biking, I’ll give a short recap of our latest biking adventure. As mentioned above, we biked further than on our two previous occasions. Boss Lady thinks maybe we covered approximately 1.5 miles. That’s not counting the very short walk to and from our biking area. That’s about twice as far as our previous attempts. Faster. Yes, we went faster. Boss Lady maintained at least trotting pace the whole time, with the obvious exceptions of when we were practicing stopping. She even had me up to cantering pace a couple times. Not that she’s exactly sure what a cantering pace is. That Boss Lady, she’s no horseman (and no need to be playing games of semantics over horseman vs horsewoman). She’s been on the back of a horse a total of maybe 20 times in her whole life. She barely knows the head from the tail. Regardless of whether you can call our pace a canter, though, she ran me hard. So hard she ran the poo right out of me, as she so inelegantly put it.

Anyway, she intends to try harder next time to discover just how fast we can go. Me, I intend to make a stronger effort at biting the bike’s tires next time.