Run Like Wolves

On tracks and trails all over Britain, runners out with their dogs, attached to each other via a bungee, are becoming a common sight. Sam Pyrah and her dog Morris try out the growing sport of canicross

- By Sam Pyrah. Photographs Sarah Medway 

Morris has already clocked that this isn’t standard walkies when we arrive at Bedgebury Forest in Kent on a crisp winter morning. It’s not just because I’m wearing running gear; the venue is not one of our usuals, and we are now heading towards an unfamiliar pack of humans and dogs, all of whom seem very excited (and all of whom are a lot bigger than him).

Morris’s suspicions deepen when, after a friendly greeting, Ginetta George, co-founder of DogFit (dogfit.co.uk), interrupts his forensic sniffing of the undergrowth and gently but firmly fits him into a harness.

To be fair, I’m sympathetic as I struggle into my own, which, rather like a rock-climbing harness, loops over each leg and fastens at the waist. It feels a bit like wearing your pants over your trousers. The final act of kitting up is the most important one – attaching a bungee line to both harnesses so that Morris and I are, quite literally, joined at the hip.

We are about to try our respective hands and paws at canicross – running cross-country attached to your dog. Canicross, Ginetta tells me, originated with the dog-sledding community in northern Europe as a way of keeping dogs fit during the off-season. But over the past two decades, it has evolved from a niche activity into a popular sport in which you are just as likely to encounter a springer spaniel as a Siberian husky. “We’ve had everything from great Danes to poodles take part in our events,” says Dawn Richards, director of CaniX (canix.co.uk), which held the UK’s first national championships in 2006. I’m hoping the sport might be just the thing for Morris, a socially awkward rescue Jack Russell with the copper top and limitless energy of a certain brand of battery, but zero recall.