Dogs are awesome, and they can make great running companions if you have the right breed. If you run any races, you may have seen some dogs running with their owners, and odds are those owners know their dogs are by their sides. But what happens if you go to run a half-marathon without your dog? Sometimes dogs finds a way to join you anyway, and they may even put a few people training for months for these long-distance runs to shame.
April Hamlin ran in a half-marathon race in Alabama recently. It turned out her two-and-a-half year-old hound, Ludivine, went out into the yard and tracked her owner down, and proceeded to run the entire half-marathon race without the owner even knowing. Ludivine finished the race in a col 1:32:56. That’s not bad!
“All I did was open the door, and she ran the race on her own accord,” Hamlin, 43, told Runner’s World,. “My first reaction was that I was embarrassed and worried that she had possibly gotten in the way of the other runners.”
One other runner in the race, fourth-place finisher Jim Clemens, thought nothing was unusual about the dog running in the race, even when he was running alongside the dog for much of the race.
“Every time I thought she had dropped off to go back home, I would hear her coming back up to me, and she would race past me up to the two leaders,” Clemens said. “She would run off to romp through streams and into yards to sniff around for a while.”
On a side note, as I was writing up this story my dog was snoozing away in her bed by the side of my desk, snoring like crazy. I am fairly confident my dog will not be finishing any half-marathons by accident any time soon.
[photo: Runner’s World]
