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Where to Bikejor

Where do I bikejor?.

Puma and Jag ready for a tunnel run...

Training. You want as few distractions and dangers as possible. You want enough width to get around the dogs if they stop suddenly. A quiet residential street is usually the best local choice. In Seattle there are abandoned streets in Discovery Park. These are good places to learn and practice.

Normal running. I do this either on quiet residential streets or bike trails that are not heavily used. Streets actually are easier to run on than bike trails. This is because streets are wider and allow you to wander around a bit.

Most residential streets are around 20 feet wide. Normally, even with one car on the road, your team can use up several feet on the right side of the road. It is not difficult to run a team when you have around 8 feet of available width.

Most bike trails are 8 feet wide, some are 12 feet wide. You get half of this width at best when bikes come the other way. Figure you want a few inches from the edge of pavement and at least a foot from oncoming bikes. My dogs use a little more than foot of width each while running. There is not much spare width. I figure that the tolerance for side to side movement when running two dogs wide is around 6 inches maximum on a narrow bike trail. When I do three dogs in a fan hitch, we must be exactly on the dot, and there must not be many other bikes or people.

Being around a lot of other bikes tires a dog out psychologically. Dogs can't hear other bikes that are about to pass you with all the noise you and your bike make. This means that bikes passing from behind are a surprise to them. I tell my dogs “bike behind, bike haw” as a bike passes us so they know what is coming. A big group of bikes can be very intimidating to your dogs. You may want to pull off to the side if you see a bunch of bikes headed your way from any direction.

Urban trails are the hardest to run. They have people, dogs and bikes in various mixes. I try to avoid running the dogs when there are a lot of other people on the trail. There are three ways to avoid crowds on trails: run in bad weather, run early or late, run rural.

Running in bad weather is pretty simple. Wait for rain or cold and then do your run. Unfortunately, you need to find a different strategy for warm weather.

If you are running early or late, proper safety equipment is essential if it is dark. In warm weather running early in the morning, just at or after dawn, works well. However, on a really urban trail even early moring runs can be a problem as your dogs will find people sleeping along the trail. This can be disturbing both to your dogs and to the people they find.