Running the Distance with Bodhi
Ernesto reflects on his runs with man's best friend
I’m running along the shoulder of a rural New Hampshire road thinking about aging. I’m 55 years old, and my companion on this run, an Australian Shepherd named Bodhi, is a year and a half.
He’s much faster than I am, but for the moment, as a distance runner still tackling marathons and ultramarathons, I can run longer than he can without starting to flag. I’ve been carefully working his distance up over the past few months, though. Someday he’ll be both faster and able to go longer, but that’s somewhere out in the future. Right now? The two of us feel … aligned.
It’s a strange, beautiful feeling, that alignment. It’s not just in our tolerance, or perhaps our need, for these almost daily runs. It’s not just that he now senses when I’m going to turn, or stop, as though he can read my mind through the leash that tethers us.
It’s not just that when we’re both in the groove and I slip into a tempo pace and he begins to gallop and turns and looks back at me, tongue lolling and what can only be a grin of sheer delight on his face, that I can’t help grinning back just as unreservedly. It’s all that and more: On these runs we completely understand each other and the land we’re running through.
Which brings me back to aging. Dogs’ lifespans are compressed greatly compared to ours. Which means this dog, this beautiful bundle of energy, muscle, fur and joy, might reach the peak of his capabilities as a distance runner in the next four years or so and then begin to slow down.
I wonder if I can hold on to enough of my own top-end ability as a runner to carry him through that. I picture us slowing down together, the runs getting shorter and easier as we each find new ways to carry on despite this ache or that. Meeting the inevitable together.
But that’s also been the beauty of running, in my life, in the lives of all the runners I know. It adjusts itself to who we are when we meet it on any given day. Turn out at any race here in New Hampshire and you’ll be stunned at the mix of ages, from kids on up through octogenarians and beyond. The sport adapts with us to the seasons of our lives. Because we were meant to do this.
And in this season, while I sometimes contemplate my own decline as Bodhi and I trot along together, I’m still just as often planning the next big push. Because now, while marathon training has taken a backseat to making sure Bodhi gets his miles in, I’ve discovered a whole new running adventure: canicross.
The first nudge toward this was a sore back. I’d had Bodhi in a harness, but wore a regular leash around my waist. The more miles we logged and the stronger he got, the more the leash dragged on my lower back. After a month of increasing pain, I found canicross gear. Belts that look like rock climbing harnesses and distribute the dog’s pull to the runner’s hips and glutes. Bungee leashes and racing harnesses to distribute the force of the pulling safely on the dog.
My back improved immediately. But now my algorithm (and our running group’s text thread, the most organic algorithm of all) is showing me stories about canicross racing.
I learned recently, for example, that Ben Robinson and his dog Zuma, running as a team, ran 11:56 for a 5K.
Whoa. Now we’re talking.
Sure, I’m at an age where I’m standing on the edge of inevitable decline, but just when that happens remains an unknown, and between then and now, with Bodhi joining me for this next season of my running life, I may yet go faster before I go slower. And there are certainly some PRs yet to set for the two of us.
