So Pumpkin pulled it off... she won the Puppy Love 5K! Most of the race there were a few runners ahead of us running without dogs, and on the last stretch, we caught up to the leader and used him to draft the head wind, but then I could hear some dog tags gaining on us, so I passed the leader and found a runner in good shape with a border collie on our heels, so we turned it up to pull it through in the end (as shown in the video). There was a little confusion at the awards, because my tag had smudged in the rain, and when they asked me for my info, they recorded my smudged tag as first (Porsio Landers) and my new tag (Porfirio Landeros) as 2nd... the real 2nd place didn't get recorded, so they bumped up Nathan from 3rd to 2nd and bumped up 4th to 3rd.
So, in the photo, we posed with Pumpkin the middle :-)
Anyway, it was really fun to run with her and a lot of other dogs and people. It was good for her to be around all the activity and still able to do tricks and obey commands, even if only for a couple moments. She even charmed the news weatherman with some of her sit-up-and-beg while he reported her results on KUSI live, and people loved my Puma-style Pumpkin shirt (thanks Laetitia). So, the video and all the
pictures are up, and I'm hoping we can find a similar event, since Pumpkin keeps me running almost every morning!
So, through the course of doing some heavy social marketing at work, I stumbled across a twitter account with the most awesome background image: a little spaniel balancing yogurt cups on her head with a spoon in her mouth balancing a golf ball. I immediately turned my attention to Google image search to discover that the star of the photo was Cindy the balancing spaniel, and was featured in an article two years ago. Here we are, a week later, and we decided to finally let Pumpkin have a go, since Cindy was 8 years old at the time of the photo, and I'm sure this dog needs a puppy to pass the torch along to - Pumpkin is certainly up to the task, right? So, today's first exercise consisted of something "simple" - balancing a mini tennis ball in the crook of the nose. We'll let you be the judge, on a scale of 1 to 10, please :-)
