It’s so nice to have the equipment back outside again! It is raining on it this morning, but at least we’ve been able to use it for the past two days. My goal is to get a consistent running A-frame with both Layla and Raven. Of course, the retraining with Layla is going much better than it is with Raven. Raven just struggles to run the A-frame with speed and confidence. She wants to pause at the top and then that makes her stutter step, well, it’s just not pretty. The problem has been that when I’ve tried to go ahead and work with that pause and just ask for either a 2o/2o or a 4 on the floor, she pauses, and then runs down a ways and bails. Doesn’t seem to matter what kind of hoop or target or mat I use, I still get this silly bailing off too high with her. So, she’s going back to the running A-frame too now. Layla on the other hand, is doing well. She loves to do anything full speed, so my only challenge right now is figuring out where I want the stride regulators to get the most out of the speed to get her the furthest into the contact zone. I have tried watching her as we’re running, but it’s hard to see while I’m moving. I also asked my husband to help me watch last night, but he wasn’t that much help either. LOL I think I am going to set up the camera and see where her stride is taking her right now, and see if it looks comfortable or not, and then adjust things accordingly. One thing I can say is that with all this running I shouldn’t be needing any quick trim burn and cleanse products in the near future.

As for the dogwalk…I am happy to report that Layla seems to be understanding the 2o/2o position nicely. She was 100% on it yesterday. I let Dare run the dogwalk as well, to see if the work we’ve done over the winter on the board in the barn was still in her head, and it is! She is also doing a good job translating it to the full dogwalk. I’ve been setting a pretty slow pace on the dogwalk, but yesterday I did start to add a bit of speed to increase the criteria. I’m also trying to remember to send them ahead of me, to run alongside them and stop at the contact zone and to run clear past the end of the contact zone without slowing down to give them a clear picture of what I expect of them, regardless of what I’m doing. So far, so good. Let’s just hope this rain doesn’t make things too muddy out there today, and that we’ll be able to train later on today.