Dog-sitting

I'm dog-sitting for Stephanie and David (of the Random Stephanie Encounters fame), which is always fun.  They have two whippet mixes who are very well behaved and fun dogs.  Last night, we all hung out on the couch that the dogs are allowed to it on and they blatantly ignored scary-sounding animals barking (or something!) outside.

Random fact: Florida has coyotes.

What dose this have to do with running?  You can't sleep in too late when you dog-sit because the dogs will let you know when it is time to get up.  They are crated at night, but one gets pretty active if you aren't up around 7am.  So I knew that this would be helpful for going relatively early.  The weather this morning at 7:15am was absolutely beautiful...but I couldn't go running yet because I had to feed the dogs, then take them out.  Ah well.  They found an absolutely enormous caterpillar in the back yard.  Disturbingly big.

I did finally get out around 8am, which wasn't so bad.  Today was 4 miles again.  If you feel like I'm always running 4 miles, actually that's exactly how I'm starting to feel.  I'm sure that it will vary soon enough.  The run was just me circling around Stephanie and David's neighborhood.  I had to do a bit of backtracking at one point, but for the most part there were enough streets to get through the 4 miles without repeats.

I kept passing a couple that has two small chihuahuas.  I've seen this couple before: they take a baby stroller with them, presumably in case the dogs get tired.  As I was on the very last part of my run (I think 3.8 miles in or something), I passed the woman for a third time -- she was actually now biking around the neighborhood with her dogs in the bike basket.  She looked at me and said, 'You're good!'  Always nice to get random encouragement from strangers.  Actually, I felt pretty good through the end because it was shady and I still had a little oomph in my step.  Nice change from some days!