Me: Doing some yoga Zoe: wag wag bound bound Play!
Me: Not right now
Zoe: nuzzle nuzzle wag Oops did I almost knock you over when you were in triangle pose? Play!
Me: No! Knock it off!
Zoe: huffgoes to the edge of my yoga mat and watches for a few minutes
Me: yoga yoga yoga
Zoe: wag wag bound bound Play!
Me: No!
Zoe: hufflays down to watch me some more
Me: Yoga wheee!
Zoe: wag wag
Me: stern look
Zoe: crawling on her belly towards me in submissive posture, big sad eyes. Pleeeeeeaaaaaase
Me: Oh all right. C’mere ya big lug.
Zoe: Happy happy happy happy happy!
Ha! My cats do this to me all the time. They get under my feet while I’m doing cardio, they lay on top of me or try to grab onto my arms while I’m doing weights, they get under my back or my stomach while I’m doing crunches or yoga. And of course, being cats, when I finally give up and start paying attention to them, they wander off, saying “No, I don’t want your love, now that you’re not trying to do something else.”
Heh. My yoga teacher, whose studio is in the basement of his house, has a cat.* at the end of our second-to-last-session, Yoga Kitty came in while we were on the floor. First she came over to me and sat inside my legs (I was seated with my feet placed soles together in front of me – forget the name of the pose). Our next position (last one of the class) was simply lying on our backs, and Yoga Kitty decided that my stomach would make a good nap spot. So she climbed aboard and started purring. No one else could see all of this because they were facing the other direction, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud. When the teacher (who had been talking quietly) asked us to think about what we were grateful for in our lives, I said, “I’m grateful for the warm purring cat that’s on my stomach right now.” Cracked everyone up, it did.
*Well, not really. His college-age daughter has a cat. A few years ago she asked if the cat could stay with him for a while. The cat is still there. Pretty kitty, too. Too bad Yoga Guy isn’t much of a pet person really.
The cats take off when I work out because all that noise and jumping around makes them nervous. The dog is deaf and blind and it wouldn’t be aerobics if I didn’t trip over him and land on my butt at least once.
Very cute I like how you wore her down to where she was crawling on her belly just to get your attention haha
Dolly is like this too. She’ll sit on the couch and watch me while I hop around but the moment I am on the floor she feels the need to be as close to me as possible. Very hard to do crunches when you have an 80lb dog leaning on you, hoping to get her belly rubbed.
When I just had the one cat, he always took off while I worked out. But the second one is considerably more intrepid, and now that they’ve figured out that I will stop rather than risk stepping on them, they’re unshakeable. I realized that I have to lock them up while I work out (which I hate doing, they cry for the whole hour!) when the more intrepid one actually stuck his *head *under my step machine, while I was on it. :smack: I nearly killed myself trying to jump off before I crushed his tiny little kitty skull.
I didn’t finish my workout last night because the gym closed two hours early because of the roads. It was closed Monday all afternoon, but I think I made up for it with my efforts yesterday. Holy, crap, that was an intense workout!
Clark* will take a more direct route. If you’re sitting on the floor, you obviously want to play, since you’re on his level, so he’ll just come up to you with a toy in his mouth and nuzzle you. If that doesn’t work after a few seconds, he’ll just flop down in your lap and look at you. Note that Clark is a lab mix who weighs about 50 pounds, so you’d think that it would take some effort for him to fit himself in a normal-sized person’s lap, but the dog somehow does it effortlessly.
And, well, it works, because once you’ve got fifty pounds of dog in your lap, you’re gonna have to at least wrestle some to get rid of him.
*Cite. Ignore the schmutz; my parents scanned it with an apparently-icky scanner. And yes, he’s wearing a graduation cap, because it was the last day of obedience school.
Yet another reason why, in my highly biased opinion, my Lab/rott mix Bitz the Wondermutt is a serious contender for Best Dog Ever.
In my old house, the workout room was a converted formal dining area. The matt was in the front, the heavy bag in the middle and the weight area in the back. When I’d work out, Bitz would come in and just lie down in the entryway.
She’d occasionally watch with interest, particularly when I was doing bag work. She was never entirely sure if she should jump in, since this thing was obviously attacking me, but held off since I seemed to be handling things all right by myself. She’d never get in the way or bother me, though.
When I finished with the weights and stripped off the support belt, she’d causually come over for pettings while I cooled down.
In my current place, the workout room has a baby gate, since it’s also the cat’s feeding area and her sanctuary when she doesn’t want to be around the dogs. Bitz and her little sister will both lie right in front of the gate while I work out, and both of them pop alert when they hear the belt come off.
I have a pool and swim for exercise all summer and my last dog (who didn’t swim) could never understand that I fell in the big hole full of water on purpose and he would run around the pool and bark hysterically the whole time that I was in there. I lock my current dog out of there when I swim now because he’s blind and kept accidentally falling in and couldn’t find the side.
The younger of my two cats, Morgan, likes to participate in my yoga sessions by using me as a human obstacle course while doing sun salutations and then flopping down underneath me when I’m in downward dog.
It’s totally her fault that I don’t do yoga at home anymore. Yep. All her fault.
Heh, some days she just can’t stand to not be in physical contact with either me or my husband. Other days she’s fine playing/hanging out by herself for a while. This was apparently an “I need constant attention” day, and hubby wasn’t home to distract her until I was done with my workout.
