Life in a bubble is easy

            Stress in an unknowable entity.  You can’t see it, can’t touch it, can’t taste it, hear it, or smell it.  But wow, can you FEEL it.  You can feel it in your back and in your shoulders.  Or in your heart or your lungs.  And of course, the strongest place you can feel stress is in yet another unknowable entity: your mind.  I find it amazing to think about what stress can do to a person.  This indistinguishable thing can cause physical ailments like heart attacks, strokes, ulcers, random pains, a cold.  And then there’s the effect on the mind: panic attacks (which I’ve been told feel much like heart attacks), irrational behavior, depression, loss of appetite.  The list could be endless.

            Stress is universal.  Everyone feels it in some way, but the ways in which we deal with it differ drastically.  Some people need to talk it out, some exercise, some drink.  Some people have hobbies that are relaxing, and some get massages.  Then there’s a large part of the population that just don’t deal with it.  They let it fester until it grows into something so much bigger than it ever should have been.

            I’ve never been someone who lets myself get overly stressed about things.  I’m pretty good at letting the bad things that happen in my life roll off my shoulders.  I grew up in a large family, and in order to survive 3 opinionated siblings, there are times when you just have to let it go.  But not all stresses can roll off your shoulders.  The paper you have to write in college isn’t going to go away if you just forget about it.  Money is a constant stress that doesn’t disappear.  Learning about my student’s not-so-perfect home lives isn’t something I can easily “let go” of.  So for those times in my life, I’ve always had some pretty good ways of dealing with stress.  Reading and writing has always been helpful.  Swimming was a big part of my life up through high school.  I can be pretty introverted when I want to and often just being alone helps.  When I discovered running, I couldn’t believe what an amazing de-stressor it was.  When you’re running, it’s so easy to think about everything and nothing all at the same time.  Whether I’m with friends, or by myself with my iPod, stress just disappears while I’m running.

            But as we know, in the beginning there was no running for me.  So before there was running, there was the dog park.  The tiny dog park that sits at the foot of McCarren Park in Brooklyn is a bubble.  Inside the wrought iron fences, there are two entire social networks.  There are the dogs of course, and then there are the dog owners.  When you are in the dog park, nothing outside exists.  You get to watch dogs play (and what could be more relaxing than watching dogs play?) and talk about dogs with other dog-owners who are just as obsessed as you.  In the bubble of the dog park, real life disappears.

When I first realized how energetic Lucy was, I took her straight to the dog park.  She was a hit there.  She was so floppy and uncoordinated that she’d constantly trip over herself.  She was a roly-poly mass of flesh with a hound’s howl and ears so long that she couldn’t drink out of the water bowl without getting the tips of them wet.  Other dog owners loved her and looked longingly at her, wishing their dogs could still have that cute puppiness in them.  Every time a new puppy came in, you could just see everyone melt.  Lucy grew up there, and through Lucy and Lucy’s new-found friends, I made my own friends.  Suddenly I found that my life was centered around the dog park.

Here is what life looked like then:  Wake up.  Get to work at least an hour early.  Plan the day.  Feel lungs start to constrict as the morning bell approaches.  Welcome my first graders.  Drown for the first half of the day in a mess of learning how to teach and learning how to control kids who were used to simply being ignored or yelled at (or worse) at home.  Eat lunch with other drowning teachers and commiserate.  Spend the second half of the day floundering to stay afloat while counting down minutes until the afternoon bell.  Send the kids back into the projects across the street.  Try to breathe.  Take the subway home while trying to breathe.  Get Lucy and walk 15 minutes to the dog park.  Breathing gets easier.  Enter the dog park.  Breathe.  Big deep breath.  Breathe.  Spend anywhere from 60-90 minutes wasting time watching dogs play and talking to dog owners about unimportant things.  Revel in how easy it is to breathe.  Walk home.  Eat dinner.  Sleep (kind of).  Repeat. *NOTE: on weekends, replace “sleep” with “drink” and replace entire work day with “sleep.”

And so life went for a full year.  I survived that first year of teaching.  I made it through puppy training.  I integrated the social circle of the dog park into other aspects of life.  I moved in with a new roommate that I met at the dog park.  I was happy.  Or at least as happy as I’d been in a while.  Life was good enough.  Then, as always seems to happen after I become comfortable and content with my place in life, things abruptly changed.  Lucy developed an alternate personality with a few select dogs she didn’t like so much.  I have named this personality Lucifer.  Just when I thought I had it all figured out—the dog park as my life raft buoying me up above all the stresses forcing me down, Lucifer pulled it out from underneath me.  And for a moment in time, I began to sink again.

Lessons Learned

Here are the top 10 things that Lucy taught me in her first 3 years of life:

10) Don’t put food too close to the edge of the table.

9) Toys can be destroyed easily by a hound dog with a strong jaw.  Don’t expect them to last for longer than a day…tops.

8) Shoes taste good.  Especially your favorite ones.

7) Don’t leave dirty underwear on the floor if you intend to keep it.

6) Cats are fun toys.

5) Roommates should always keep their doors closed.  Their dirty clothes apparently taste way better.

4) Couches can be chewed.

3) Barking is really exciting.  Especially when you can do it really loudly.

2) Playing chase is fun.  If you live in a place where there are dirty socks that can be snatched and the house is a circle between the kitchen, living room, and dining room, running in circles to play chase is even more fun.  And if you try to be tricky and turn around to circle the other way, dogs are smarter than that.

1) If you run out of contact lenses, don’t leave your only pair of glasses on the bathroom counter while you are in the shower.  Even glasses can be eaten. 

Because I kept Lucy crated during the day, the only opportunity she had to be destructive was when someone was “supervising.”   Supervising a rambunctious puppy every second of every minute isn’t quite so easy, so draining Lucy of energy became my number one goal.  Ultimately, I wanted to be able to relax in my own home and not have hawk eyes on my dog every moment.  It took me a while to take her outside the apartment, as I was a bit paranoid from my previously mentioned traumatic puppy incident.  We relied on pee pads for about 2 weeks and I forced my roommates to grin and bear the constant barking and whining until the final puppy shots were had.  As soon as she had all of her shots and could step foot on dirty Brooklyn streets, my first idea for draining energy was long walks.  After all, as Mr. Caesar Milan always told me, in order to have a well behaved dog, you must have a tired dog.

I started taking Lucy to puppy training.  We went to something called “Clicker” training, where you wait for the dog to do what you want, give them a “click” noise with a little finger clicker they give you, and then immediately follow with a treat.  In this puppy class, it was all about positive attention—no negativity allowed.  Lucy absolutely loved attention.  In fact, she couldn’t stand it when our instructor turned away from her to work with another dog in our group class.  As soon as the instructor stepped away from us, Lucy barked.  And barked.  And barked and barked and barked.  Why wouldn’t she?  Here was this nice lady who taught Lucy to do fun things like sit, stay, wait, come, and leave it.  Lucy was a quick learner and every time she did something good, this very nice lady clicked at her and gave her a piece of turkey.  Yep, no simple dog treats here—cold cut turkey from the grocery store.

Clicker Lady was baffled by Lucy’s sudden love for her.  She claimed that she’d never had this issue before, that Lucy was an original and unique challenge for her.  Her suggestion: buy one of those rubber kongs (the hollow big kind that looks like three balls decreasing in size and squished on top of each other) and fill it with peanut butter.  That way, when Clicker Lady walked away during a class, I could give Lucy the kong and let her work on getting the peanut butter out.  This worked pretty well for about 30 minutes of the hour long class.  Lucy then spent the next 30 minutes alternating between barking loudly and continually licking the roof of her mouth to get all the peanut butter off.  Nonetheless, we suffered through 5 embarrassing sessions of this and Lucy came out of it knowing the basics I mentioned above.

When it came to leash training though, I found the clicker plus my little pouch of turkey, and holding a frantic puppy on a leash was all too much to handle.  And on the walks where I didn’t bring turkey along, all our training seemed to slip right out of Lucy’s mind.  So as soon as our 5 weeks were over, I dropped the clicker and turned back to Caesar who advised me to be the pack leader, be assertive, and use gentle force when necessary.  I got Lucy a pinch collar, one of the ones that Caesar described as taking a “quick bite” when you pull it tight.  It then sits lax around her neck when not being pulled.

            On our first few walks with this, I felt horrible.  I’d seen other dogs with the same collar and thought it looked torturous.  Knowing the theory behind it, I felt a little better but I couldn’t help wondering what others thought about me as I walked down the street.  I’m not sure how closely you looked at those puppy pictures of Lucy a few posts ago, but I must assure you that she was a very cute puppy.  When we walked down our Brooklyn streets, we could barely make it 2 blocks without being stopped by adoring onlookers wanting to pet the floppy puppy.  I always felt like when they bent down to pet her, they were judging me for this mean looking collar. 

            I got over this pretty quickly though and eventually settled on a method that involved the firmness of Caesar’s training, with the positive reinforcement of clicker training.  Again, as with teaching 6 year olds, a little of both is necessary.  When I go running with Lucy now, I am so glad that this particular bit of training was of such importance to me.  If you haven’t tried running with a dog before, imagine a dog running back and forth in front of you, pulling on the leash, lunging at other animals.  I’ve witnessed this with other dog owners, and it just doesn’t work.  Except for on certain rare occasions, Lucy is great on the leash.  She runs or walks right next to me, never stepping in front and often lagging behind.  She’ll show interest in other dogs, but thanks to my oh-so-vicious collar, doesn’t often lunge for them…although I still instinctively brace myself every time we go past one. 

As Lucy has gotten older, calmer, and more mature in the past years, it’s nice to remember sometimes that she still has a lot of those playful puppy tendencies from her early years.  Typically, when we run together she just trots along next to me, but on very rare occasions she gets this sudden burst of puppy energy, grabs her leash, and starts play tug-of-war, prancing, and growling.  This doesn’t usually last long, but it’s quite entertaining.  When she did this on our run yesterday, I started laughing as I usually do, unable to do anything but simply smile and let her have her fun.  It wasn’t until she pranced in front of me, made me trip over my own feet, and then dive to a crash in the middle of the gravely outer loop of Green Lake that I realized I should probably reread my last post and take a little of my own advice.  I can’t help but let this slide though.  No matter how much older and mature we get, sometimes a girl just needs to have fun. 

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.