Well, you guys, I did it! This morning I completed my 1000th mile. Mom also achieved a minor accomplishment and completed her 2016th mile. There really was nothing noteworthy about the run. No fun stories to tell… no Friends or Frienemies along the way. Not this morning anyway. But I have had some really fantastic adventures in those 1000 miles, and have made some real Friends in this group in the process of covering those 1000 miles.
Dogs don’t tend to accomplish many long-term goals in our lives. We tend to just go day-to-day on routine and take things as they come. Mom is always trying to classify things: food smells “good,” poop smells “bad,” runs are “long” or “short,” “fast” or “slow” I don’t judge smells or runs or adventures, I just want to take it all in. People get too wrapped up in what it all means and forget to be in the moment. I can’t tell time, every run is just as fun for me as the last. My experience of this challenge has been different from Mom’s; instead of thinking about how far we’ve gone or how long we still have to go, I’ve just loved that Mom has been so diligent about making sure I get out of the house regularly. The few times I’ve been allowed to decide the pace, sometimes I run fast to feel the wind in my ears, and sometimes I slow down to sniff the world and see who’s been there. I let my heart tell me what the run should look like. Which is all a long-winded way of saying that just because we’ve accumulated some arbitrary number of people-miles, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop spending time together and keeping each other company on runs. And when interesting things happen to me, I’m not going to stop telling my friends about it just because we’ve crossed some invisible line.
See you soon!
–Oscar the Pooch
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