What a busy day today! I got up at what we affectionately call "oh-dark-thirty" and went for my regularly scheduled Saturday morning long run (14 miles this week). I had to run at a fairly good pace because Dudley had his first post surgery herding lesson scheduled at 11:30 am. My run started at 6 and I live almost an hour away from where we were meeting to run so I needed to finish my mileage in under 3 hours. For you runners out there I know that's a pretty slow pace, but I'm normally a 10 minute miler on a flat course and this was a hilly course. Plus we started at 6am and it's fairly dark at 6 am, so you tend to run a bit slower than normal until the sun finally comes up. I managed, even with a long stop to chat with a friend, to finish, get changed and get on the road home in 2 hours and 50 minutes. Yippee! I hadn't had breakfast so I considered stopping to grab a breakfast burrito at McD's or Sonic, but I decided I wanted to get home, take my ice bath, get cleaned up, have something to eat and then load up Dudley to take him to his lesson. So I just high tailed it home without stopping for anything. As I'm pulling in my driveway, Dudley, Taffy and my husband all come out to the garage like a greeting committee! My husband is on the phone with our herding instructor. Seems she'd had a cancellation and wants us to come at 10:30 instead of 11:30. I just have enough time to take a quick shower, get dressed, load up the dogs and hit the road to make it to the lesson at 10:30. No ice bath or eggs for me this day. Oh well. When we get to the gravel road that leads to the sheep station, Dudley suddenly perks up! I think he remembers this smell. He's standing up, sniffing the air and starting to get excited! By the time we get to the sheep station, he's pacing and whining. He can't get out of the car fast enough! He IS excited! We have a chat with Bridget first about where Dudley is with rehab, an overview of what the vet has said, etc. Then we're finally in the pen with the sheep. While Dudley is excited, he's sort of forgotten some of what he'd learned. He was barking and running at the sheep and got them stuck in the corner and couldn't get them out. But hey, he was so happy! You should have seen him bouncing around. Bridget got one of her border collies out to help keep the sheep moving for Dudley (the sheep know Dudley's an inexperienced puppy so they'll just make for the corner and then stare at him and stamp their feet--the sheep version of na-na-na-na-boo-boo!). Once the border collie would get the sheep out of the corner then Dudley would keep them moving around the pen. Oh my gosh he had fun! He was running with such joy! And he ran much more than he ever did before. We always thought before his surgery that he didn't have much stamina but now we realize that he was just in too much pain to run very much. But now that he's not in pain anymore, OMG! He runs like a banshee and he's FAST! At the end of the lesson our trainer deemed him ready to go in all respects. He looked really good to her, no problems that she could see. If he does start to have any incidents or problems we'll back off, but from what he showed today, that's unlikely. There was no limping afterwards like before the surgery so he's back to regular weekly lessons. We're so happy!!! We took a video that I'll be editing and will probably upload next week.