After the conclusion of the Idita-Walk  I challenged myself to walk Suki a minimum of 30 consecutive minutes each day, with the end goal of working up to 2 hours. To add a little more pressure and further push this goal, I’m going to post our weekly walking times on the Facebook page every Monday. I’m not used to setting the tracker on a regular basis, so for the first little while there will likely be a few unknown times in the mix. Hopefully I’ll get my  scatterbrain sorted out quickly and remember to set the tracker every time I go out.

Yesterday I faced my first rainy day since starting. The walk began drizzly, and by the time we were halfway through it had turned into full-blown rain. I learned three things on that walk: The first is that I hate jacket hoods. They obstruct your vision, and every time a large raindrop landed on my head it sounded like a gunshot in my ears. Partway into the walk I opted to ditch the hood and just get soaked (I’m sure I looked completely insane to everyone we passed). The second thing I learned is that I don’t mind the rain at all, in fact it’s actually pretty fun. The third thing I learned is that Suki actually wanted her rain jacket. She seemed a bit off initially, so I pulled her rain shell out of my pack and tried it on her. To my surprise, her step had a renewed spring to it after that. She’s shed out all of her insulating undercoat in prep for summer already, and here on the wet coast the rain can get pretty chilly so I think she needed an artificial layer to replace her usual built-in thermal defenses.

In other words: She’s basically bald. For a Schipperke, anyway.

Well actually, I guess I learned four things. As we passed by the park I noticed the only dogs there were a group of Border Collies, which were running in the field while their owners huddled together under a large tree. Just as I was shaking my head, laughing to myself about how it would just be Border Collie owners that would trudge out in this weather to take their dogs to the park, I realized that I had been out (without a hood) walking in the rain for an hour. They at least had the common sense to take shelter under a tree.

Great, now I’m crazier than the Border Collie people.

There are very few photos from yesterday because after a while they all started to look like this.

Suki and I would like to challenge everyone to set a personal goal and join us. Either post your times to your own page, or comment under our times with your own. You can post your times every day, once a week, once a month, biweekly… Whatever works best for you. If you don’t have a pedometer, Endomondo has a free app that lets you track your time. Get as creative with your posts as you’d like: include a photo (or photos) from each walk, decorate your time sheet with graphics, etc. Gimp is a free art program that’s great for these kind of projects.

Happy walking! I’ll be posting our completed frame on Facebook this upcoming Monday. The times from this past week will also dictate my new goal time for the next week.