We traveled to Davenport on Sunday for another NADAC trial hosted by the QCDC. Belle and I cued four out of five runs, and David and Dusty cued three out of five runs. Best of all, on our second Regular run, Belle did an awesome running A-frame. Even better, I knew it was a good A-frame in real time. (It's hard to tell what happened on the first run since I'm between the camera and the A-frame, but my impression while we were running was that Belle put in skittering steps in the blue and missed the yellow.)
I had really wondered whether or not a dog could do a running A-frame on both a 9'-sided and an 8'-sided A-frame. But when I watched Rachel Sander's DVD, I became convinced that it could be done by most dogs since Rachel's method requires that the dog figure out how to handle the ascent. As long as a dog is still capable of thinking while running, the ascent should signal to him that he has to power down a little in order to make the descent on the 8'-sided A-frame.
A bigger problem for Belle is a slatted A-frame--I removed the slats from mine 8 or 9 years ago. Belle has a rather poor opinion of slats since she didn't encounter any until well into her training. I may have to just bite the bullet and install slats on our home A-frame temporarily once the weather turns nicer.
Here's the video of four of our runs:
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