BOXER ADVENTURES

 I mentioned that yesterday Sisko walked with Marc while Booker and I ran.  Sisko has been having some difficulty with his knees.  Specifically his CCL which is comparable to the ACL in humans. The CCL can tear which, if it tears completely, requires surgery.  If it is partially torn there is a chance that it can heal.  So when last summer we came home from the beach and after laying down for a while Sisko got up with a terrible limp we had to make some decisions,  The most commonly used surgery for the CCL is TPLO surgery.  Sisko is 7 1/2 years old.  So we would be putting him through an intensive surgery and recovery time.  And statistically when you repair one CCL, there is like an 80% chance that the other will repture requiring surgery on the other leg. After some research we made the decision to not go in for surgery right away and try to manage it.  We placed him on a regimen of glucosamine/chondroiton , fish oil , and turmeric .  He gets one of each of these twice per day. This

 I continue to introduce Booker to running.  He is a straight up disaster on mile 1.  He is distracted and unfocused.  He thinks nothing of veering out in front of me while we run. But today something amazing happened.  He got it .  What do I mean?  I mean that he actually got into the groove of running next to me, at my pace, and just settling in. I was so happy.  And then we ran into Marc and Sisko.  We were passing them as they walked and needless to say Booker had no interest in continuing to run without them.  He turned into a crazy man - leaping into the air, pawing at the leash and generally fighting me as I tried to get him to continue on as he tried to stay with Sisko. Booker is our 5th Boxer and he is, by far, the most high strung boy we've had.  I'll talk about that in another post, soon. Eventually as they faded from sight, he got back into a happy run with me and we made it 6.5 miles.   He is strong and athletic so he runs great - it is the mental challenge that he

 I recently watched an episode of Cesar Milan's new show.  The woman featured clearly cared deeply for her dogs but she stubbornly refused to believe that it was anything she was doing that created the behavioral problems in her dogs.  In fact she was incredibly defensive and combative about it.   Unfortunately the vast majority of our dogs' issues are directly caused by the mistakes that we humans make.  Not on purpose of course, but nevertheless we are the problem. One such mistake that I see frequently happened just yesterday.  I was walking my dogs down a path and in the distance I saw a woman walking an Australian Shepherd. As soon as that dog spotted us, he went into hyper-alert mode.  He ran to the end of his leash and started hopping around and barking. " It's okay, calm down, stop..." the woman told her dog as we got closer.  She then reeled the dog in and pulled him off the path.  She then crouched down to his level - he was completely ignoring her - and

 Today I took the dogs over to run a trail.  I'm more of a road runner and usually end up falling and ending up bloodied whenever I try to run a technical trail.  But it was sunny and about 60 degrees.  That's not that warm but for short-nosed, big boned dogs like Sisko it sure is! So a slow run in the woods was where it was at. I came THISCLOSE to wiping out once but managed to get my feet under me before tumbling to the turf. And - quite unintentionally - Booker swam for the first time.  It scared the crap out of both of us.  We were nearly done and there was a path down to the water where people go to fish.  We headed down and Sisko and I were standing on the rocks as Sisko was carefully looking for a place to wade in to take a drink and I heard a SPLASH!  I turned around and saw that Booker had fallen in and was completely submerged!  Before I could even run over to him, instinct took over and he surfaced and quickly paddled back to the sloped rock and easily climbed out. 

  View this post on Instagram A post shared by Booker and Sisko (@boxeradventuresny)

 Since we hike a lot, we have our own backpacks and we like our dogs to wear them on long hikes too so they can carry their own items such as water, collapsible bowls , poop bags and sometimes even food.   We've had some backpacks for our dogs in the past and my main gripe with them is that no matter how much we tighten the straps and load the backpack evenly on each side the backpack seems to fall off the one side or the other.  Now there are extremely expensive backpacks that probably do work better, but I haven't been inclined to pay upwards of $100 for a backpack when we don't use them all that much. I found some backpacks on Amazon that got some pretty good reviews and were reasonably priced and decided to give them a shot.  We took them for a test run today. These ones were easy to fit onto the dogs and definitely stayed in place way better than ones we have used in the past.   Sisko has previously worn a backpack so he was unfazed when we put it on him, but I thoug

 Today we headed back to my favorite spot in the world - the beach.  It was around 49 degrees and there was a STIFF wind.  We started off running directly into it.   The wind did not seem to affect Sisko and Booker's running ability but it certainly did mine - I have a much wider wind resistance if ya know what I mean! Booker has been extremely scared of even dipping his toes into the lake when we have gone there previously.  Sisko happily splashes through and gets a drink when he wants to, but Booker avoided that until the last time we were there when he got brave and waded in a bit.  This time he ran right into the water (following Sisko) almost up to his chest! It was a full 2.75 miles to the outlet - where the pond meets Lake Ontario - and we couldn't go any further - unless we wanted to go for a swim!  I was pretty spent by then from battling the wind, but now we'd have the full 16 mile-ish breeze against our backs.  That was a relief and it gave me my second wind - no