Our Outdoors: Weighty matters

I crossed the finish line inside the Fargodome a few weeks back at the start of the first nice day this non-winter season conveniently had offered up and checked the exercise app on my watch which was tracking my effort. It read 1:41:33 as I clicked the End button on the display. If correct, I bested my half marathon time by over four minutes. The next day I checked the official results on my phone and it displayed a time of 1:41:26 which worked out to a pace of 7 minutes, 45 seconds per mile; not too shabby for a flat-footed 44-year-old who weighed nearly 250 pounds in his junior year of high school. When asked why I run and work out with a heightened level of diligence here in middle age and now 70 pounds lighter, I often cite back to those days as one of the primary reasons.

Just prior to the weekend’s running festivities, I led my yellow lab to the black matted scale at the veterinarian’s office to get his annual shots so he’d be able to visit the boarding facility once again and maintain his overall health for the upcoming fall hunting season, avoiding summer nasties like heartworm carried by mosquitoes and tick-borne illnesses. Ole is a large creature, and he’s been that way from birth, able to rumble through cattail sloughs carving a walking path at least big enough for me, and sometimes even another hunter. By the time he was two years old, he had settled into that 100-to-105-pound range, so it’s never a shock to see triple digits show up on the LCD display at the vet.

While it’s a trite excuse to say Ole is big-boned, he truly is. He’s also quite muscular, but has a notable layer of fat as well, and if there were a dog fashion runway, he’d likely be the king of the plus-sized models – still good looking, but noticeably bigger than his contemporaries. So, when the display bounced from the upper teens, then into the low twenties and finally settled back down onto an even 120 pounds as he plopped his behind down on the scale, even I gasped audibly. He was up 13 pounds since the prior spring, and I struggled to come up with an explanation.

With my wife’s German shepherd, we walk five times a day religiously, covering the block with such regularity that I consider us to be the neighborhood watch. We know every pheasant call, from the raspy one on the far side of the draw to that dominant one of the big, backyard-safe bird which patrols the lawns on the east side of the street. My dog’s bluffed charge frequently sends that rooster with what looks to be a 28-inch tail feather back down into the small drain at the end of his suburban domain, no matter how distant we are from him. As the saying goes, birds don’t get that big by being stupid; but apparently all the walking wasn’t stopping my dog’s size increase.

In the morning, when the two dogs are eating after our first walk of the day, they like to trade bowls repeatedly. The shepherd is particular and waits until Ole has first eaten some kibble before she nudges him out of the way, and he goes to the other bowl. I don’t know if she’s having him check it for poison, like I often do with my kids’ chicken nuggets, but it’s obvious that Ole doesn’t mind being the guinea pig for the day’s feeding if he gets a few extra bites. The extra caloric intake settled in my mind as a likely source of my lab’s weight gain, but there was certainly another one.

Following a 20-inch snowfall the first week in November and a few follow-up weather events, which basically shut down much of our hunting efforts until a few perilous cross-state journeys to less-covered lands, our outings in the field were limited to early season trips for grouse and pheasants in September and October respectively. Where we would normally hunt at least one weekend day until the upland season’s end on the first Sunday in January, we didn’t after the snow fell.

In those treks, we typically cover miles and miles and miles of terrain. We hunt hard. Up hills, through brush, and deep into tangled sloughs. Like me, Ole doesn’t fear the sweat equity that comes with going to those places birds tend to be, plowing through hell to find upland heaven. It’s on those journeys that we use up our extra calories, where every mile of blacktop under my running shoes from the summer and under his polar-bear-sized paws in each daily walk pays off, especially in the late season when snow often mandates the additional physical effort. We’re always ready for it. But when nature takes away half or almost two-thirds of that season, it’s easy to see the results of a more sedentary lifestyle, comparatively speaking.

So with the vet’s advice of a more monitored feeding program, and the hopes of a longer upland season than the previous one, we enter the summer, with me looking to maintain my pace and weight from a winter of monotonous treadmill running into a summer out in the open, and Ole looking forward to a seasonal slimdown, chasing bird dummies in the backyard and shedding a couple extra pounds ahead of a long autumn afield. Through that combination we both hope to find a balance, and put to rest these weighty issues next fall ... in our outdoors.