I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but dogs are just like 6-year-olds

There are many reasons why I am glad that I chose to be a teacher.  Teaching is certainly not an easy job, but it is a rewarding one.  You get to watch your students grow on a daily basis.  You get to see their excitement as they achieve a new goal or discover a new tidbit of knowledge.  You get to enjoy the pleasure of knowing that every day their lives are touched by you, influenced by you, and hopefully made better by you.  And you get to laugh with them.  Kids love to laugh, and they’re really good at it.

            With teaching, every day is a new day with new experiences and surprises.  You have to be 100% engaged in what you are doing every moment those children are in your classroom and you have to know how to keep those 25 odd children calm and productive for 6-7 hours a day.  In the teaching world, we call this good “classroom management.”  Some may disagree with me here, but I believe that the qualities necessary to be a good teacher are the same qualities necessary to be a good dog owner. 

            I wanted to be a great dog owner.  I had an image of the kind of dog I wanted Lucy to be.  One who was social and friendly with dogs and people, one who could travel with me to a friend’s house, or go camping with me on the weekends (not that I ever went camping).   I wanted a dog who was a good walker—no pulling on the leash or barking at other dogs.  And I realized that if I wanted those things, I had a lot of work to do.  I started watching rerun marathons of the Dog Whisperer.  I had a DVR at the time, and any time the Dog Whisperer played on any station, it was recorded.  This was at the height of Caesar Milan’s fame, so it was ALWAYS on.  I got to the point that I had to sift through all the recordings to see which ones I hadn’t seen yet.  I bought Caesar’s book and read it in a matter of days.  Caesar became my new best friend.  I thought his theory about dogs made a lot of sense.  If you believe you are in charge, they will believe you are too.  The same idea applies to 6-year-olds.

To be a good teacher, you have to be consistent.  Kids need to know what to expect from you, when to expect it, and they need to be able to trust that they will get what they expect.  This is how they learn to trust you.  You need to be consistent with your expectations as well.  If you expect them to sit quietly during a lesson, you need to expect that during every lesson.  You can’t let anything slide for anyone.  To train a dog well, you need to be just as consistent.  You can’t yell at her one day for getting on the couch, and then the next day think that it’s cute.  Puppies are cute…really cute.  When they do things that may seem cute at the time, like putting paws up on the table, you have to imagine how cute that will look when the dog is 75 lbs.

To be a good teacher, you also have to be persistent.  If you teach a lesson, and the kids just don’t get it, that doesn’t mean you give up.  You teach it again in a different way.  And you keep trying and trying until you find something that works.  When you’re training a dog, you can’t give up the first time she decides she won’t come when called.  If she doesn’t come, you figure out a way to make her come.  If there is even one time you ask her to come and then don’t follow through, then for the rest of your life she’ll be thinking “well maybe this time she doesn’t really mean it.”

You also have to possess 2 qualities that may seem to contradict one another.  You need to be firm and positive.  Kids need to know that when you ask them to do something, they need to do it.  And then when they do it, you have to get excited.  REALLY excited.  Or else they won’t do it again.  Both dogs and kids seem to feed off of our energy.  If I am really excited about observing rocks (which is a lesson I was required to teach recently), then the kids are really excited about rocks too.  Teaching is an acting job.  The kids play off your emotions.  Dogs do too.  If you are excited that they went and got that ball and brought it back to you instead of running around in circles to play chase, they might be too.

I am in no way claiming that I am the perfect dog owner or the perfect teacher.  I’m not and I don’t believe either of those people exists.  What I can say, is that over the years I’ve learned a lot and I’ve tried my best.  As difficult as it was time-wise, I think it was kind of fate that Lucy came into my life right at the start my first year of teaching.  I picked Lucy up from the dog shelter literally 2 weeks before I stepped foot in my first classroom full of 1^st graders.  At the same time I was learning how to manage my classroom, I was learning how to manage my dog.  I’d never trained a puppy on my own before, and I most certainly had never taught 20 first graders before.  Neither of these things was easy. 

I like to look back now and say I did a pretty good job teaching both my students and my dog that year, but in truth I was fumbling around in the dark with my eyes closed.  In college, you read books and teachers tell you about how to be a good teacher.  When I got Lucy, I listened to Caesar Milan and read his book telling me how to be a good dog owner.  People can tell you things and you can read about things, but it’s impossible to really know what to expect until you experience it yourself.  Until you’re in the thick of it.  

A new family member

Today as I was driving home from work, stuck in Seattle’s “Viadoom” traffic, I started thinking about the next part of this story.  So many things could have happened differently, and it leads me to wonder if I would have found running without Lucy.  Did I find running, or did running find me?  Was this something that was destined to happen for me, whether it involved Lucy or not?  I’d like to think that eventually, somehow running would have happened.  But I just can’t discount Lucy’s role in this whole adventure. 

When I picked Lucy out at the same animal shelter I got Maya from, it was an entirely different experience.  After a few months of recovery from the Maya incident and hesitancy over trying again, my dad decided to drive out to NYC from my hometown in western NY and come with me.  It felt right having family with me to make this choice.  After all, I was adding another member to our family. 

We drove out to Long Island this time, fully prepared.  I’d bought a crate, had new chew toys ready and waiting, even pee pads laid out on the floor.  We walked into the same puppy room, crates stacked ceiling to floor, filled with little balls of noisy energy.  My eyes moved straight to another little black lab with white-tipped ears, but my golden-retriever loving dad pointed to a little golden colored puppy in the crate just above it.  Her ears were so floppy it seemed like she might trip over them.  She came excitedly to the door when we said hi, pushing her paws up against the bars.  I was torn…try again or start afresh?

I’m a girl who tends to listen when her dad talks, and something drew me to that little puppy when I finally held her.  I decided that a fresh start was the way to go.  The volunteers at the animal shelter estimated that she’d weigh about 50 lbs and was most likely a lab/hound mix.  The face of a lab, with the floppy ears of a hound.  Lucy’s current weight of a lanky, lean 75 lbs goes to prove that those “estimations” are seemingly random guesses.

I hugged her tight the whole car ride home, and we took her into my new apartment.  My roommates and I had rented a loft in an old burlap bag factory and spent about 6 weeks building walls for 2 bedrooms and 2 large closets.  We’d puppy proofed everything, and we were ready. 

My dad and I took time thinking of a name.  My dad, a big Beatle’s fan, had named all of his Golden Retrievers after Beatles songs.  He had a Sunny named for Sunshine Days when he and my mom started our family.  Our current family dog was named Abbey for Abbey Road.  We went through our mental file folders of Beatle’s references and landed on Lucy.  Lucy in the sky with diamonds. 

Everything felt right.  Lucy was a part of our family.  And like many members of our family, Lucy had a lot of energy.  A LOT of energy.  She ran circles around the apartment, playing and barking at every noise.  And she had sharp teeth, and a strong jaw.  She could devour the toughest chew toy in minutes.  This did not bode well for personal belongings in the apartment.  It was from this moment on that the battle to kill Lucy’s energy started.

Right now, as I sit here writing this, Lucy is asleep at the foot of my couch, curled up around my feet.  She’s peacefully snoring and every now and then kicks her feet and lets out a muffled yelp as she chases something in her dreams.  It’s hard to believe she used to be that puppy.  The day I got Lucy, I had no idea where life would take me.  All I knew then was that I had made the first step towards taking my life in a different direction.

A little sadness before the happiness sets in

I firmly believe that the challenges we go through in life happen for a reason, even though those reasons may not expose themselves until much later on.  In the toughest of life’s challenges, including those I am facing today, I try to reassure myself by thinking that there is a reason for all of this.  The problem was, when I decided to adopt my first puppy, I didn’t know this yet.  When I made the decision to adopt, I had just graduated from college with a teaching degree.  I was looking down the neck of my first year of teaching, hadn’t gotten a job yet, and couldn’t stop thinking about getting a dog.

The vast majority of my life we had anywhere from 2-4 pets in our house.  I grew up around animals and found life without them somewhat unsatisfying.  In my post-adolescent, staring-into-the-face-of-real-life mind, this simple dissatisfaction had manifested itself into the idea that getting a dog would solve all of life’s problems (general loneliness, insecurity, and discomfort in my own skin).  I wasn’t happy in NYC and felt as though the city had started to suffocate me.  I needed an animal to help me breathe, and I needed it immediately.

            It was two weeks before moving out that I convinced my not so dog-friendly landlord to “look the other way” because there was a puppy that a friend of mine was giving away that I had to get NOW and couldn’t wait until I moved.   Then I hopped on the Long Island Railroad with my 2 soon-to-be roommates and got off at a large dog shelter that was known for always having puppies on Saturdays.  I took about 10 minutes to pick out the cutest little black lab I’d ever seen, probably no more than 7 weeks old.  I named her Maya and carried her home on the train smiling the biggest smile I’d had in years.

            During the week that Maya lived with me, she was never alone.  I loved that little puppy with all the pent up love I had in my heart.  I took care of her as I imagined a mother would take care of her newborn.  I spilled all of my sorrows and worries into her.  Maya was a quiet, playful, happy puppy but as the week progressed I noticed she wasn’t eating much at all.  By the end of the week she started having diarrhea and vomiting.  The day of graduation from college, I left her with my future roommate for the day.  I could go through the sob story of rushing to pick her up after graduation with my entire family and my grandmother who was visiting the city she grown up in but hadn’t seen for 40 years.  I could tell you about the wait at the animal hospital and the frantic drive to take her back to the vet at the shelter so that care was free.  I could describe in detail the week of awful waiting and check-in phone calls that got less and less hopeful.  I could write about how the vet said she had Parvo, a puppy infection, and had caught it before I adopted her.  I could relive for you the last call, when hope was gone and I had to say goodbye over the phone.  I could even talk about the weeks after when the devastation of it all set in.

            But I won’t do that, because that is not the point of this story.  The point of this story is that without this horrible experience, without the preciously short life of Maya, I wouldn’t have found Lucy.  And without Lucy, I wouldn’t have found running.  And without running, I wouldn’t be who I am today. 

In the beginning, there was no running...

My first marathon memory took place in New York City.  I was 19 and had just moved into my first apartment during my sophomore year of undergrad.  The apartment happened to lay along the New York Marathon course in Brooklyn.  It was the year that P. Diddy decided to take on the marathon.  My neighbors across the hall, a group of NYU boys, had decided to make a large banner to hang from the roof of our building protesting P. Diddy’s sweatshops.  They talked about it excitedly for days.  The night before the marathon, I went out to a few bars with some friends and came home as the sun was rising…as was our custom on most weekends.  I slept through the entire marathon, even though my window literally looked onto the street below as people went by.  There was a water stop just before my building, and all I remember seeing of the whole event was a street strewn with little paper cups.  My only thoughts were, “I wonder who’s going to clean all this up?”  Had P. Diddy not run that year, or had to boys across the hall not cared, I probably would have wondered who could possibly make such a mess on the streets of Brooklyn without anyone complaining.

The idea of running a marathon, or running period, had never crossed my mind…and wouldn’t for 3 more years.

My next marathon memory took place my senior year of undergraduate school.  I was student teaching in a 3^rd grade classroom with 2 mentor teachers.  One of these teachers was training to run the New York Marathon and the other was pregnant.  Both of these major life occurrences were foreign to me, but hearing about marathon training blew my mind.  As I listened to this teacher talk about her 15, 18, and 20+ mile runs, I’d cringe.  How could someone run that far?  WHY would someone run that far?  By choice?  For no reason other than to do it?  I was baffled.  The day of the marathon, I crawled out of bed at the bright and early time of 9:30 to be out on the sidelines to cheer her on.  I even made a sign.  I was standing just 10 blocks away from my old apartment where 2 years previous I had slept through P. Diddy’s first marathon.  I stood outside for a half hour waiting for her to run by.  The runners all looked miserable to me.  I just couldn’t fathom what kind of crazy person would do this to themselves by choice.

Today as I write this (6 years after watching that teacher run by, 8 since sleeping through P. Diddy’s race), I write it as a marathoner.  I have completed 2 full marathons and 2 halves.  My next half is in a month, with 2 more on the docket for next 6 months.  Plans for full number 3 are in the works, and I have decided to enter the lottery for the New York Marathon this year.  So the question is, how did this happen?  When did I go from being the unhealthy, unmotivated person I was to being a runner?  I intend to answer this question, but it will take a while.  And, funnily enough, the answer starts with a dog.  Her name is Lucy.