First, let me just say that today I had planned to do some 400s on the treadmill, just to see how they felt. However, the weather was beautiful and for once my wife and I both had the opportunity to get home at a reasonable hour - all three of which are necessary for taking the dogs running (since if only one of them gets to go, the other one is not a happy puppy).

Anyway, we headed off to the park. I started out by doing 1K with Sabrina, which didn’t work all that well. It was our first time to run together, but what we do is that my wife heads one way around the park, I go the other, and we keep meeting. Sabrina the half-collie wonderpup kept trying to cut me off and get me to go back to find Stephanie and Bear. When we did run, it was fun, but there was much stoppage.

After that, I swapped dogs and got my old bud back for some more serious mileage. Because I felt bad that we hadn’t been running together for a while, we fartleked doggie-style. By that I mean that we took a minute or two for walk/sniff time, then a minute at a “recovery” pace (actually about 9:00, Bear isn’t much for “slow”), then 90 seconds to two minutes at a flat out run - from 6:45 the first interval down to about 7:45 on the last one. We did several of these - I wasn’t keeping count - over the next 2 1/2 miles. For the last mile of our four-mile jaunt, we kept to a constant pace and turned in an 8:00, followed by a 7:00 final tenth.

All in all, a happy shiny run with two very happy (and quite tired) pups. After the four miles were done, we did some sprinting together in the field, which was nice too. Maybe I can call those untimed impromptu cross-country 400s.

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