Running Dogwalk Saga Begins

Zumi had her first 2 "bad" running dogwalk sessions.  I knew it would be coming eventually, the first hurdle of many, many ups and downs in the process.  Since we've only been doing it about x2/wk she just hasn't had that many sessions in since we started slightly over a month ago so thus the delay.
In her fairness Zumi has absolutely zero clue that there is criteria now.  She's just excited she gets a thrown toy!  And on the big positive side, Zumi's not really jumping, but she is over extending that last stride now.  Lowering the board slightly helped a bit so I'll keep it at that height for awhile.  I also think it was worse than previously since these were the first sessions I grafted the board onto the full size dogwalk versus being propped up on the ground or grafted onto the lowered dogwalk.  The increased angle between the full height board and the grafted board resulted in Zumi doing a little jump onto the plank from her start position.  Since I don't have anything around that can prop it up to about knee high on the ground I'm going to continue the grafted setup and just try starting Zumi very close to the plank instead of further back on the actual dogwalk.


I was thinking about Vito's running contacts recently and how much I screwed up that initial training.  But persistence paid off.  Over a year ago Vito did maybe x1 running dogwalk session a week mixed in with sequence practice.  And then I lost that open ring time and it's been almost a year now since Vito has had any weekly dogwalk practice.  Owning a dogwalk is very new and I still need to better apply the rubber material so Vito hasn't done much with it at home yet.
Looking over his trial records Vito missed only 1 DW contact in 2014, none in 2013 and only 2 in 2012.  Of course I know there were some in there that would have been misses in NADAC if it were a 36in zone versus the 42in.  In general the faster Vito goes the deeper the hits, so we certainly have had many in trials I wasn't excited about.  It just feels so much more carefree about training Zumi's knowing that it will come.  And of course I can always turn it into a stop ;)