Lodi

Lodi, 2023. Wherever I was.

She was ten pounds. I have watched her climb a mountain at minus twenty, through three feet of snow, jumping from one of my footholes to the next with ice frozen into her coat, and she never once complained.

She was not being tough. She did not decide the night before. She had no gear, no plan and no programme. She just wanted to be where I was.

Her name was Lodi, after the song, because Charlie loved it when she was small. I wanted to call her Scuffle Duffle. I was overruled.

She was an affenpinscher, ten pounds of pure muscle, and she was a gift for my wife, who could not handle her for a minute. She dug holes. She got out of the yard. Eventually it was put to me plainly: take her with you everywhere, or she goes.

So she came everywhere. To work. Into the shop. And on the runs.

That is where we fell in love.

She would not stop. Forty kilometres, fifty, sixty — no questions asked. We ran more than twenty ultramarathons together. We climbed mountains in spikes, in snow past my knees. We saw off black bears. A grizzly. One golden one.

I am supposed to be the expert on this. I write about movement as treatment and I believe every word of it. But for four years the thing that got me out of the door was not discipline, and it was not a programme. It was a small dog standing beside it who did not care how I felt. A dog does not wait for the right time. It is never too cold, never too late, never the wrong week to start. There is no right time. She needed one reason, and the reason was that she loved somebody and wanted to be where he was. That was enough for sixty kilometres in the snow.

LODI 2019–2024. RIP.