Finding doggies on the trail is common, and delightful

We spend a lot of our trail run time out in the countryside that is very sparsely populated. Most of the time we don't encounter any residents but when we do these are normally people that live, for the most part, off the land that they own and maintain and they are normally quite confused or amused when a group of 25 mostly western people come running around with silly outfits on.

Sometimes these people have dogs and when they do, they normally have a lot of them.

This particular time we encountered a group of very young pups that were very excited to see us.

Chiang Mai is a rather large area and this is why we normally have to go 20km or so out of the city before we can get to any meaningful level of nature. There are over a million people that call Chiang Mai home, so of course most of the place is all cement and tall buildings. It is very refreshing to get out of all of that, even if it is just for a few hours.

Now in my title I said that finding doggies on the trail is "delightful" but this is not always the case. Many of the adult dogs are there for a purpose for the farmers and that is to be protecting of their property. While we have not had any cases of anyone being bit, there have been some close calls. Normally, the Hares that make the trails will seek out paths that deliberately avoid any homes with territorial dogs. The dogs are just doing their job after all and we never make any attempt to harm them because it is us that are trespassing, and we are very aware of this.

Most of the land that we do our runs on we don't actually have permission to do said run on, and because of this we do our best to be as respectful as possible and we actually will clean up not just our own garbage, but the garbage of others while we are on our runs. We do this so that the locals will accept us and hopefully not be afraid of our presence and perhaps even welcome it. It's also good for the environment to clean up a countryside that is absolutely inundated with plastic garbage.

There are also people that bring their own dogs to the runs with them but we always advise that the owners leave them back at camp and not come along with us. There is nothing that will make a territorial dog more upset than the presence of another dog, even if it is a little cutie like this one.

We have maintained our 3 run per week schedule for over a year now and you do not need to be a member to come and join us. I would imagine that most people will want to be members after just a single participation. If you would like to see our entire upcoming schedule you can check it on our official website.

Come one come all! On on!