My most valued training partner for the last few months has been Jemby, our eight year old Golden Retriever, who would happily walk until her hips and knees give out if she thought there could be a beach, a telegraph pole, ducks or food scraps at the end of the walk.
For the last eight years I've walked her nearly every morning, so what she and I don't know about climbing hills, isn't worth knowing. Of course, she's not allowed into national parks, otherwise she'd be with me on the first few stages of Trailwalker too. She could carry my backpack!
The other day I persuaded her to run alongside me for a kilometer or two, though she quickly ran out of steam. Why? Well, it's a little-known fact that a golden retriever's metabolism is geared almost exclusively to growing and shedding hair - less than 5% of total kilojoules consumed is available for things like exercise. If you took all the hair grown by a golden retriever in the course of an average ten year lifespan and joined it end to end, it would wrap around the earth at the equator 256 times... it could also leave a small tumbleweed driftball of dog hair in all four corners of every room in every building in the world... or 10 driftballs of dog hair in all four corners of every room in our house a day!
Anyway, the day after our run together, I went to take her out for our usual walk, but she was convinced that I was going to try and make her run again. She sat like this and sulked until I walked to the corner and called her. Ultimately, the siren's call of pole-sniffing, grass-eating, duck-chasing and a swim were too strong to resist.
I like to think I'm smarter than her, but she knows when to stop, which is more than I do.
