Its been an interesting few days. I took Thursday off from running, and was planning to do seven miles on Friday, when I realized that we’d committed to visiting some friends of ours for pizza Friday night. No problem, I thought, I’ll run later in the evening. Well, it turns out that they needed a lot of assistance in prepping for a garage sale the next morning - so no running then.

No worries, there’s always Saturday morning, right? Well… not quite. After getting going slowly (hey, we’d been up late the night before), we ended up helping out at said garage sale until about 4pm - including a very nice thank you lunch at Berry Hill Baja Grill. And we had plans to visit my in-laws for a late dinner at 8pm. Still, on the way home I figured that I could rest up after lunch, collect the dog, head out at 6pm, back by 7, shower, change, and still make dinner. Cool.

Naturally, by now you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, right? When we got home we found out that our two lovable, friendly, generally obedient dogs had tunneled out of the yard and into the neighbor’s yard. The neighbor who, it turns out, doesn’t keep his gates latched. They were loose, and for who knows how long.

To cut a long story short, it took us about another hour to round them up. Luckily they hadn’t made it out of the neighborhood; I headed down to the park and Stephanie roamed the streets - she talked to some folk who had seen them not too long ago, which helped us feel more confident, and I enlisted everyone I saw walking the loop while I ran the trails. Eventually I heard voices one field over and ran to talk to them; when I turned the corner I saw one of the women I’d previously talked to, a man on the phone (to my wife), and our two misbehaving furballs. They’d been swimming. They were safe.

The bad news… We spent most of Sunday fixing the damage and (re)installing an invisible fence system along the visible fence boundaries. More than that though, my leg was aching pretty badly. You see, I’d done around an hour of trail running on a slightly damaged leg with no stretching, at around an 8:15 pace (with occasional walking and whistling). I was sore to say the least.

I’ve been stretching it even since, but this evening will be the first time I’m going to do a formal run on it. I think its fine, but this is exactly the kind of scare, stress, and running issue I don’t need less than a week before my second marathon.

Oh, and to all dog owners out there? Put your celphone numbers on your dog’s tags if you haven’t done so already. And give ‘em a hug.

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