TED TERRIER TRIATHLETE

 

My human mum, Jane and my human sister, Emma both love watching the Olympics, which is something that happens every four years, and the humans from different countries all over the world go to one place in the world and do games against each other to see which of them can do the game the best, and the one who is best gets a gold medal, and the one after that gets a silver medal, and then the one after that a bronze medal, but anyone who comes after that gets nothing, but hopefully has had fun doing the game anyway, and they all are proud to do the game for their country.

In a legend – which means a story from some time ago that may or may not be true – a man called Heracles – who had a dad who was a god (not a dog) called Zeus, and a mum who was a human called Alcmene, started the games in Ancient Greece, which was still the country Greece, but when it was in ancient times, which means a very long time ago. Emma says she thought it first happened, when someone had to run from one place to another that was a marathon run away – which means a bit over 42,000 metres – to give someone else a message, which then may have been on a scroll or maybe even a piece of stone if it was very long ago – and that’s why humans now do marathon runs and that was the first game, when it wasn’t a game, but was important, cos something serious had to be told to someone. But that may be true, though it’s not a legend, cos as far as I know, Emma is the only one who has said it, and she didn’t start saying it a very long time ago, which would make it a legend. Emma might be getting her stories mixed up cos she is a human and all humans have muddled thinking and there is a true story that says a human cook, called Coroebus, did a ‘footrace’, which means a race on his feet, which may mean a race that’s fast cos you are running, or slower cos you are walking, but has been reported by humans who may have forgotten to say what it means in ancient times, who may or may not have been ancient in age humans, but he did 192 metres and was the first and only person to win a game at the Olympics in 776BC, which is the first time humans wrote down what happened, and when there was only one game. It was called the Olympics cos it happened in a place called Olympia. And since that time humans have made a lot of different games to try against each other to see who is the best at each of them. I wonder if Coroebus had to do the footrace cos he had made someone some dinner and that person was waiting for it, so he ran to give it to them, and that’s when the humans thought that has to be the first game we play. A game that involves giving someone their dinner sounds a lot of fun.

I made up games to play with my humans, and I taught them how to do them. We all had a lot of fun playing them. The humans had to do one thing and I did another thing, and it only worked if they did their thing right – I always did my thing right for me, but may have changed it to make them think more about it, which may have got them even more into muddled thinking. One of the games, I went out of one door, ran around, and barked at another door to be let in. That made my humans laugh once they worked out where I had gone, and so I laughed too, cos it’s a lot of fun laughing together. In another game, they put up a gate at the bottom of the stairs, making a high jump, that was much too high for me to jump over, but I made up the game in a different way, and waited til one of them was going up the stairs and ran past them to get to the top first, and arrive in Jane’s room with my tail wagging a lot, and usually Emma running up after me, cos I played it with her most, and then all three of us would laugh at what had happened. The prize for that game was a Babybel Cheese given to me by Jane, and I always won it. Sometimes I then had a rest on Jane’s bed, but other times Emma would carry me back down again, and then I waited til it was time to play the game again. One time it went wrong, cos Emma forgot about the game, and I was overexcited and Jane wasn’t upstairs in her room with my Babybel. It started as it usually did with Emma heading to the gate, and me following, and then I did my thing to run past her, and she missed the first stair and tripped over me and dislocated and broke her ankle. Nobody laughed, and I felt very sad, so when Emma got back from having her ankle fixed, I lay on it to heal it, and we both felt very good again. As Emma has just said, sometimes things go wrong, and it’s nobody’s fault, and then those playing the games get hurt, and that often happens in the Olympic games too. When Emma couldn’t play, I’d play with other humans. I used to do it too when I was a cat. One of my games then was to get my human dad Peter to give me food. It was quite a challenging game for me, as he just wanted to get his coffee. Really, I was supposed to wait for Emma to come to give me food, but I liked the challenge of getting Peter to do it, so I’d lift my front paws up to the top of his pyjamas and pull them down! He then fed me very fast! I also learned to open Emma’s bedroom door, to wake her up, so she could give me a strokes or food or play games.

I think food is the best reward rather than a metal medal, but when I told Emma I was thinking of entering the Dogolympics cos I know Jane and Emma would enjoy watching me, and it’s the same as the human one, but dogs play it instead, she said ‘Are you going for gold, Ted?’, I said, ‘No, I’m going for a Babybel’, and she said, ‘Well, what colour is a Babybel, Ted, on the inside’, and I grinned cos I understood what she meant, and so I decided to go for a Golden Babybel.

The Dogolympics happens when it isn’t so hot in the place that everydog has to go to play the games in. That is because we are all wearing fur coats, so it would be very difficult for us to play a lot with all our energy so that we could win, which would be too dangerous for us with a lot of heat too. The games we play are mostly the same as human ones, so not the dog games played at dog shows. But, like the paralympics where humans who have parts of their bodies missing or not working as well as for someone who is fully able, there are adaptations – which just means equipment we need to use is changed so we can do the game with it. Next thing was to choose which game to do. As I was thinking about it, I watched Emma and Jane watching the Olympics on TV. The game started with humans jumping into the river and swimming. There was a lot of water splashing around, and I could see Jane’s lips moving around and she looked as though she was trying to stop them. The same thing was happening to Emma, then as soon as the first person tried running out of the water to their bicycle, she couldn’t stop herself, and she started laughing, and then so did Jane, and then so did I, and then I thought that’s the game I have to play, cos laughing is the most important part of playing a game, unless you win, when the Babybel Cheese is the most important part. The last thing the people playing had to do was run, and I’m very good at that. So, I did a lot of practising and became a Tridoglete, which means a dog who does swimming, then cycling, then running. The swimming bit is fine, and so is the running, but the adaptation for me was a tricycle, instead of a bicycle, so my cycle has three wheels instead of two. The part of it that humans would hold with their hands is low so my front paws can reach, and the things that move the wheels around, also near the ground so my back paws can reach. This year the Olympics, Paralympics and Dogolympics are all in Paris. We dogletes had to wait til it was cooler and both tridogletes and triathletes had to wait til there weren’t lots of things in the river that would make us unwell if we swallowed them, which can happen when you’re splashing around, especially if you are doing doggy paddle which makes water splash around even more.

When I did my tridogleting, my thinking was going all round about making sure I don’t drink too much of the water, but paddle fast through it, do my shaking off the water quick as I get onto my bike, and get my helmet on so if I fall off I don’t hurt my head, then make sure I run so fast I fly along, and all that time my humans laughing as they watch, and other humans clapping and cheering ‘Let’s go, Teddy, Let’s go!’ and being given a gold medal at the end that would be a Babybel Cheese. I was just thinking about that all along and not looking at other tridogletes. Emma was there as my trainer, and I was thinking about Jane’s lips trembling watching me on TV as I did the swimming, and laughing as I did the shaking, and the biking, and then me bounding along my legs going as fast as I could make them, and I closed my eyes and imagined my human mum’s biggest smile and my tail wagging ‘nineteen to the dozen’ as she would say, and as I crossed the line, I opened my eyes and there was Mummy Jane, laughing and presenting me with my Golden Babybel Cheese! And then I saw all the other tridogletes were behind me and I had got there first, and so I got to stand on the highest podium and get given another Gold Medal with a Babybel inside it by one of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Corgis. And my humans kept smiling and laughing and saying it was very funny how my ‘little legs went like mad’, and I was so happy I had made them so happy, and they’d watched me right there in person and dog!

 

Love and licks, Ted XOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

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The Blog of Ted Terrier © 2024 by Emma Knight

Paralympics and Disabled Beings

It's very difficult when you are unable to do something because you are lacking in the necessary body parts. As you will know from my last post I was unable - or as humans call it; disabled - by being Cushinged and that made me lack energy and wee a lot and drink and eat a lot. I kept having to go to the vet for her to get the Cushing out of me and it seems she has managed that very well cos now I am too much un-Cushinged - it was supposed to stop when I was normal again but now I am a little bit the opposite. I've become a puppy again and have lots of energy, and I have grown a lot of hair back and want to go for walks a lot and jump around and, and... write all my thoughts to you. But it seems Emma got Cushinged too cos she kept telling me she didn't have the energy and unfortunately I need her to write. Actually she got Herpesed, which is very painful indeed and I wouldn't wanna get cos a Herpes sounds even worse than a Cushing, so I understand and forgive her. My other unability as a dog is that I can't write cos it's hard to hold a pen with paws or to type with paws - have you ever tried it fellow paw-beings? You end up hitting too many keys at once. You need to use someone with fingers to help you. So I have pet-stirred Emma til she finally said I could borrow her fingers and her brain, and as usual, dear readers, I hope she doesn't take over and start trying to correct me or put her thoughts through too - oh no, too late, she says pet-stirred isn't a word and I mean pestered, but if she knows what I mean I don't know why she can't just keep calm, carry on typing and leave me to it. We love each other loads really!
It makes me wonder how it would have been for any of the paralympians if their able-bodied helpers - for those who had to have them - had decided to correct them or tell them to do something else, when, even with the body parts they were lacking, they were highly skilled at what they were trying to do, just as I am highly skilled at all the things I try to do. I think being unable in some ways makes you more able in others. It's just like I always say humans have too much intelligence for their own goods. Maybe even too much ability with their hands and other parts to act on that intelligence and cause all sorts of chaos in the world to themselves and to others trying to live in it, including other animals and plants. But I digress - which as it suggests means digging around in all sorts of other things (the resses) than the thing which we are talking, or writing about, which Emma says I do a lot, but of course I do cos I am a dog and that's what dogs do, especially when they are trying to dig up something they buried to save for later. Getting back to the unable paralympians - some of them didn't have eyes or eyes that worked, and so another human had to direct them where to go, and that didn't work very well for those having to do long-jump - which is basically running and them jumping as far as you can in a pit of sand - cos many of them ran and jumped in the wrong directions and hurt themselves, or others badly. As my human mum Jane would say -  "that's not very sensible." A bit more sensible were the blind runners, who could hold hands with their guide who could see. That worked a lot better and they did very well. they all had to wear blind-folds to make them equal - in case some of them could see more than others - and the guides had to run at the same speed and just make sure they went in the right lane and right direction. I would have been very good at that job. Emma is laughing her head off - well not literally, that's her again and I've just told her that if she did that she wouldn't have a head and that's too much unability cos someone can't function at all without a head. Now she is laughing even more so I'm asking her why and she says cos I'd not have been a very good guide-dog for the blind runners at all cos I pull people along cos I go faster than them, and I decide which direction to go even if it's not the direction we need to go in. Well we'd win eventually!! You have to know the rules to break them as humans say. Yes, but you're not supposed to break them, as Emma says, cos then you'd lose whatever medal you won. Oh and gold medals aren't really gold - they are silver but painted gold, which I think is not very nice. It's be like getting a babybel cheese that has something that's not as good as a babybel cheese inside it - hm yes, that's irony... I'm an ironic dog cos that's what happens to me when I get my anti-Cushing pill... Emma's just said that IS like gold within gold cos it makes me feel a lot better. Anyway there is a problem for the runners cos who runs with a blind man runner. We only saw the women and they had to have men runners as their guides. It made us wonder who the men would have had - perhaps it would need to be someone like Ussain Bolt or Mo Farrah, who both ran as Olympians, who are fully able. I'd love to run in a race with Ussain - I'd win even though I have shorter legs than him - or maybe I wouldn't - the man, who is called the Blade Runner (Emma loves that film) cos he lost his lags and has blades instead, and whose real name is Oscar Pistorius, was beaten in a race by a man with longer blades, Alan Olivera, and Oscar said it was unfair and that Alan cheated. So maybe to make it fair in a race between me and Ussian Bolt, I'd have to have blades added on to my legs or he'd have to have part of his legs chopped off so we'd be the same height. My favourite paralympian is Ellie Simmonds. She does swimming. I don't think I've ever done swimming or if I did it was accidental. I don't like water very much. In fact I hate it when I have to go out to have a wee and it's raining, and I hate it even more when it's raining hard cos that scares me. And then when I have to have water on me cos Emma says I need to have a shampoo and cut, I don't really like that very much either, but she makes it into a game and tells me I'm a good boy and so it's not as bad as it was when I got dragged to the beauty parlour and bad very short back, sides, ears, tail and everything - so much so that Emma said she didn't know who I was though she was only joking really. And then recently she had to cut my hair even before she gave me a shampoo and threw water on me cos I was growing what she called dreadlocks. I don't think she understood that I was trying to look more like Ussain Bolt and Mo Farrah, cos they are black men and can grow dreads, but I'm a mostly white dog so don't usually grow dreads. Maybe she dreaded them though and that's why she took them off. No wonder I have trouble being a cool dog as I keep being given bad haircuts - though I better not complain cos then Emma will send me back to the beauty parlour and her way of doing it is far nicer, even though I almost always look a bit daft. Oh yes, she says I just look like I am! That's love for you :). Anyway, Ellie is like me cos she is vertically challenged, cos she is a dwarf. I don't know how she got dwarfed but Emma says some people just come out dwarfed when they are born. I suppose it's like me - I came out dwarfed too cos I have short legs like Ellie has short legs and arms and feet, like me with my paws, that sort of look too big for the rest of her. She is very nice and everybody loves her and she won lots of medals. When she won her medals Emma cried. In fact Emma cried a lot at the Olympics and then even more at the Paralympics. She said it was all very moving - all these amazing people overcoming all sorts of things to even take part and then some of them win, and that makes her cry even more. It's all good crying she says. And she and other humans getting very excited and jumping up and down while all these people did their running, and jumping, and swimming, and cycling and well all sorts of other things they do to entertain themselves. And in a way it's all a bit strange cos there are lots of signs up at the moment telling people to 'Keep Calm and Carry On' - and for a while in the summer that's not what they were doing. I found it funny to watch them, but like the dancing horses, I kept calm and carried on cos somebodies have to. Even though I'm too much anti-Cushinged, I still have very calm moments, when I watch my humans be foolish and funny... like me :)

Love and Licks, Ted and Emma XOXOXOXOX