There are countless reasons we love our dogs, but surely one of them has to be how they can make us laugh without even trying.
Meet Ludivine, or “Lu” to her confidants. Lu is a Bloodhound who was minding her own business on her 40 acre farm in Elkmont, Alabama when her mistress, April, let her out on a January day in 2016 to tend to nature’s business and explore a little. Lu’s nose took her to a fence and some interesting new smells beyond, and when she saw people running down the road, she snuck through the fence and thought she’d join them to see where they were all going.
And this is how Lu found herself as part of the Elkmont Half Marathon race.
Of course the other runners saw the dog. They later commented on Ludivine’s strange technique: Dropping back to sniff around, running through streams, stopping to smell a dead rabbit, investigating a herd of cows, then running back to the race leaders to catch up. The eventual fourth place winner, Jim Clemens, remembers Lu: “Every time I thought she had dropped off to go back home, I would hear her coming back up to me and she would race past me up to the two leaders.”
The first that April heard of Lu’s adventure was a text message she got from a friend, something to the effect that her dog was seen at the race. But then another friend called breathless with excitement: “Get down here!” April was told. April left, and we have to think that perhaps she was afraid that Lu was getting in the way.
Hardly.
Lu had run the entire race, an entire half-marathon (13.1 miles) from start to finish, and out of 165 runners, she ended up in 7th place with an impressive time of 1:32:56. By the time April arrived at the finish line, racers were posing with Lu for photos. Lu was a celebrity.
Marathon organizers changed the name of the race to “Elkmont’s Hound Dog Half” with Ludivine’s image on their logo.
She appeared on the cover of Limestone Life, a magazine published quarterly in Athens, Alabama, and she made appearances. Lu brought attention to charitable causes, and was thanked by the Limestone County Commission for bringing goodwill to the area. April found herself interviewed by everyone from Runner’s World to Time Magazine, and was the happy recipient of a portrait of Ludivane donated by the artists, BeccaVision, who had seen her story. The story was even picked up by the Telegraph in the UK!
One can almost hear the bemusement in the comment April later made about Lu: “She’s laid back and friendly, so I can’t believe she ran the whole half marathon because she’s actually really lazy.”
We conclude with one more bit of coverage about a dog whose story still makes us smile without her even trying: