17.02.11

morning run:
Bette
Posey
Eve
Frijolita
Rita
Godzilla
Elewah
Floyd
(8)

Long, hard run with a fast group over partly uncharted territory. We started out the normal way to the long and winding road backwards, from the Au Soleil Couchant road. The last time I looked at google earth I noticed that where the long and winding road reaches the swampier bits east near the road to Xixim there is another turn, which heads north. After about ~2km it hits a three-way intersection which goes west to doce on the one hand and and east to the stone bridge on the other. This is where we went today, taking the turn east to the stone bridge, and then heading home via the shire, the intersection, the "new" shortcut west of the intersection to the "secret trail" land bridge and the dirty road: 12.3k. The trail north of the long and winding road is beautiful, except for two places where there are mountains of garbage that have obviously been there a while, since I see no evidence of recent vehicular activity and I am obviously the only person crazy enough to go out there on foot (it's ~7k from our house to that point no matter how you go, so ~10k from town). Everyone was stellar. Floyd bites at the leash in excitement for the first ~20-30m now and that's it, he's totally into running from that point on. My current water bottle of record has finally sprung a leak, so that sucked a bit, because Rita really wanted water on the run; I made sure she got as much as possible, but this run had several water-hogs (Bette, Elewah, Floyd). Rita was lagging a little bit on the way home, but I didn't detect any problems with her when I checked her over at several points, so I think she just wasn't used to the distance; she certainly had fun. There were a ton of those big, white pelicans in the charco around weathertop.
GRADE: A

afternoon walk:
Bette
Oscar
Frankie
Stella
(4)

Anna and Bogus took these four out for a walk, and report that they were all very good and had a good time. When they got back, however, there was a general scrum involving Frankie, Godzilla and a bunch of other dogs. Frankie was injured a little. Roni and I have been feeling like Frankie often acts defensive inappropriately, and are wondering whether she doesn't have some kind of actual physical problem that has her feeling that way, possibly involving her hindquarters somehow. It's really hard to say, but she is often involved in dust-ups, and we intend to get her checked out by Sandra more thoroughly to see what is going on.
GRADE: A (for the walk)