They Didn't Just Come Along For the Run
Moose and Maverick aren't pets who happen to run beside me. They're the reason I'm still running at all.
This is their story — where they came from, what they did for me, and why every decision I make now runs through the question of what gets us the most time and the most adventure together.
Before Moose and Maverick
I have gone maybe three to six months of my entire life without a dog in it.
I want that to land before anything else, because it's the frame for everything on this page. Dogs have not been a part of my life, they've been the background hum of it. The constant, steady, breathing presence underneath every chapter, every move, every transition. When I was born, there was a dog in the house. When I came home from open heart surgery, there was a dog waiting. When I sat alone in the dark at two in the morning with questions I couldn't answer, there was a dog pressed against my feet. Dogs are not something I have. They are something I am.
My first dog was NaNook, a big fluffy white Samoyed my dad got in his early twenties. He was already part of the family by the time my sister and I came along, a gentle, steady presence, my first experience of what it felt like to be around a creature that was simply, consistently good. He made it to twelve or thirteen. I remember saying goodbye to him before school one morning, falling apart at my desk, and my teacher pulling me into the hallway to ask what was wrong. That was my first loss, a small, early rehearsal for the shape grief would take later in my life.
Then came Maya. I grew up watching the AirBud movies on repeat and decided, the way only an eight-year-old can decide something, that I wanted a Golden Retriever exactly like the one on screen. That Christmas, my sister and I came down the stairs to find a black crate with a red bow, a Golden Retriever puppy waiting inside. We named her Maya. For thirteen years she was my best companion, there for every big game, every big life moment, every ordinary Tuesday in between.
When she was eleven, she tore her ACL playing fetch with me. I felt responsible, and I decided it wasn't going to end her run. I bought a leg brace, a red light therapy device, and went to work, twenty minutes at a time, two or three times a day, walking her a little further each week. Months of slow, unglamorous, patient effort. She recovered. I didn't know it then, but I was rehearsing the exact kind of stubborn, daily, unglamorous recovery I would need for myself a few years later.
Maya died on a brisk Sunday in the fall of 2021, in the middle of COVID, at home, surrounded by my whole family. We carried her into the woods across the street and buried her ourselves. She taught me, before any therapist or sermon or near death experience ever could, what actually matters: not the accomplishments, not the finish lines, love, presence, and the people who stay in the room when things get hard. She also taught me how to let go. How to leave this world surrounded by love, and how that could be okay. My grandmother would teach me the same lesson again about a year later.
Ellie, our Maltese Shih Tzu, and later Crosley, an Aussiedoodle we brought home after Maya and my grandmother both passed within months of each other, filled the house back up with life. I loved them both. But they were family dogs, loved by all of us, belonging to the household. Not mine, the way what came next would be mine.
Maya
Moose
Adopted three days before they stopped my heart.
I adopted Moose three days before my open heart surgery. I know exactly how that sounds. I knew it then too, standing in a PetSmart on a random Saturday with a three-month-old puppy staring up at me from a crate, three days before a surgeon was scheduled to stop my heart.
It started as a fifteen-minute errand with my sister Abi. Then we walked past a rescue adoption event and saw a small golden puppy asleep in a crate — Lab and Pit mix, three months old, eighteen pounds, favorite snack peanut butter, named Cricket. Neither of us needed a dog. My family had lost our childhood Golden Retriever six months earlier, and there was a quiet in the house we hadn't named yet. Abi wouldn't let up. I filled out the adoption form assuming, hoping, we'd be turned down for not having a fenced yard.
Five minutes later, we were approved. I called my mom, who was on vacation and had no idea any of this was happening. We are not adopting a dog, she said. Then I turned the camera around.
Kyle. You are having open heart surgery in four days.
I know. Abi's going to take care of him while I'm in the hospital.
They said yes. I sprinted to an ATM, and twenty minutes later that puppy was mine. By that evening, watching him thunder through the house on paws three sizes too big for him, the name was obvious: Moose.
I had him for two days before surgery. Two days of playing until he was tired, potty training, falling asleep on my lap. The night before surgery, sitting with him on the couch, I felt something I hadn't expected: less alone.
While I was in the hospital, my sister sent photos every day, Moose in the yard, Moose asleep, Moose with his peanut butter. Every one of them landed in that hospital room like a small, warm light. Something to get back to.
When I came home, he couldn't sit on my lap, I couldn't risk his weight near my incisions. So he adapted. He pressed himself against my feet, laid on the edge of my blanket, found the exact boundary of how close he could get without hurting me. He knew something was wrong. Not the details, the energy. And every time the pain or the darkness crept in, he pressed closer.
He gave me a reason to get out of the recliner. A reason to take the walk around the backyard I didn't want to take. Something to care for when I barely felt capable of caring for myself. Eight weeks of sitting at home would have gotten very bleak without him.
As I got stronger, we went further, around the block, down the street, further, longer. When I was in cardiac rehab asking the nurses every day whether I could try running, part of what was driving that question was the picture in my head of me and my dog, running together. The day they finally let me run five minutes on a treadmill, I was thinking about what was waiting for me at home.
Every training mile for the Heart Mini Marathon, every long Saturday building toward the Flying Pig, Moose was beside me. He set the rhythm on the days I didn't have one. And when the drinking took hold, about a year after surgery, when I became the worst version of myself and started leaving him alone for hours at a time, he never wavered. He didn't know what alcohol was or why the person he slept next to every night was slowly disappearing behind something dark. He just knew me. Tail going. Eyes bright. Certain that I was worth loving, every single time I came back through that door.
On the nights I sat alone in the dark, questions swirling, guilt pressing down, he was pressed against my side, holding me to the earth when I was doing everything in my power to float away from it.
Everyone thought it was crazy to adopt a dog three days before open heart surgery. I am so glad I didn't wait.
I rescued Moose that day at the adoption event. He has been rescuing me ever since.
Moose
Maverick
Named for the thing that finally gave me permission to stop.
Maverick came into my life at the lowest point of it, and I had already known he was coming for almost a year.
I'd wanted a Doberman for years, the intelligence, the loyalty, the way they bond with one person. The thing that kept me on the fence was Dilated Cardiomyopathy, a heart defect that runs deep in the breed's genetics: the heart enlarges, the walls stretch thin, the muscle gives out. It's more or less what my own heart had done a little more than a year before I finally decided to get one.
I understood that risk in a way most people looking at a Doberman puppy don't. I'd lived it. Eventually I landed somewhere with it: if I have a heart defect and I'm still here, still fighting, I can live with the possibility that a dog I bring home might have one too, or I can let fear keep me from something that could be beautiful. I chose the beautiful.
I put a deposit down on a litter due in October 2023 with a breeder in Northern Kentucky, locking in first pick. I told no one, not my parents, not my sister, just one coworker. For months, watching that litter grow through a breeder's photos was the only thing in my life generating any real anticipation. That, and Moose. Those were the two things pulling anything alive out of me during that stretch.
Underneath the excitement, a harder question kept surfacing: what am I going to do with this puppy if I keep living the way I'm living? I pushed it away every time.
I drove to meet the litter at two weeks old. I picked each puppy up, and then I picked up one who just settled. Curled against my chest, completely relaxed, like he'd already decided this was where he belonged. That was him.
Six more weeks of waiting. December 6th, 2023, the day I drove to the breeder's house and brought him home. Moose sniffed, licked, tilted his head, tried to figure out what I'd just brought into his home. By the end of that first night, watching this fearless, wild little puppy tear around the apartment, I felt something I hadn't felt in months: real joy.
A few days later I drove both dogs to my parents' house and walked in holding an eight-week-old Doberman, having told no one. Shock, then love, and underneath it, the hesitation people carry about the breed. That's a Doberman. Aren't those dangerous? The same question, every time, until Maverick leaned his full seventy-pound weight against their legs and looked up hoping they'd stay and pet him forever.
The weekend after he came home, the usual messages started, what's the plan, where are we going. I didn't respond. I sat there with a puppy on my lap and Moose beside me and asked myself, for the first time in a long time, what I actually wanted my life to look like. I knew I couldn't leave him alone for hours to go drink. I knew it before my brain caught up to why. And I realized, sharper than before, that I'd been doing exactly that to Moose for over a year.
I need to be honest about the timeline, because I don't want to make this cleaner than it was: getting Maverick was not the moment I got sober. My last drink was still about nine months away. But every time I went out after he came home, I hated it more. That growing disgust with who I still was is what finally brought me to Labor Day 2024.
Maverick didn't save me from drinking. But he started the chain reaction that made saving myself possible.
Maverick
The Pack
Moose is not a dog's dog, selective, keeps to himself. But the night I brought Maverick home, he accepted him into the pack immediately, gently, like an older brother who understood this small creature was now his responsibility too. He taught him the rules better than I ever could have.
Moose is the foundation. He's fire, the one with an almost reckless instinct to defend, ready to fight head-on, some of it built long before I ever met him. Maverick is the presence, calm, composed, a posture that keeps trouble away without ever needing to raise his voice, and underneath it, still goofy enough to make you laugh five minutes after standing sentinel at the door.
They say you get a soul dog in your twenties. I got two, two that showed up at completely different chapters of my story and served completely different purposes. Moose showed up three days before my life changed forever and held me together through the wreckage. Maverick showed up in the darkest chapter and gave me a reason to start coming home instead of going out.
Here's what I've learned they gave me that no person could, not because the people in my life didn't try. My parents did. My sister did. My therapist did. They all showed up. But a dog doesn't have an agenda for your recovery. A dog doesn't evaluate your progress or offer perspective or try to fix you. A dog just stays. And in the staying, something happens that no amount of talking can produce.
They showed me how to laugh again when nothing in my life was funny. They showed me what loyalty looks like when it isn't conditional, isn't negotiated, doesn't bend based on what you did the night before. They showed me unconditional love the way it's actually lived, not spoken, pressing close when I was hurting, choosing me every day without the possibility of that choice changing.
Most of all, they showed me how to be the man they saw in me. Not the version I was performing for the world, the real one, buried under the walls and the worst version of me. They saw through all of it before I could see it myself. And by seeing him when I couldn't, they gave me a reason to go find him.
They didn't get me out of the dark by dragging me out of it. They walked beside me in it until it got lighter. That's still what they do, not in grand gestures, in subtleties. The way Moose presses against my leg when my breathing changes. The way Maverick lays his head in my lap when I go quiet. Nobody else in the room would notice. I notice every time.
Every decision I make now runs through them. Every choice about where I live, what I do, how I spend a weekend, it gets weighed against one question: does this give me more time and more adventure with my dogs. That's not a metaphor. It's genuinely how I decide things now. They sat in the fire with me, took the hits, stayed through all of it, never once looked at me like I was too much to carry. The least I can do is build a life that keeps showing up for them the way they showed up for me.
Dogs come and go, that's the trade. I've lost dogs before, and I'll lose these two one day too. But what they put in you doesn't leave when they do. The love, the loyalty, the steadiness, the lessons about presence and devotion, that stays. That becomes part of who you are.
We are a pack. The three of us. And this bond will outlive us all.
They run beside me. You can run with us.
Every mile I run and every dollar you give goes toward youth heart screenings, heart health awareness, and the American Heart Association. Follow the mission, or help fund the next screening.
— Kyle, Moose & Maverick