Urban Tracking (15)

We met at the Auburn theater last Thursday for urban tracking.  The first thing I did was get Nadine to video Gimme and I moving together for the MDSA Music Match challenge.  J'Anna had done it before for me, but I wasn't moving fast enough and so Gimme was doing an awkward transition gait between a walk and a trot.  Gimme's SLOW trot has me race walking, which I can't keep up for very long, so I had to loop a good segment of it.

Clearly I wouldn't be able to hold up that pace for a couple of minutes for a freestyle routine, so they are going to try to find music with a bunch of speed changes.  Should be very interesting and I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

For tracking we set up the same as we did before, but with all right turns.  So the dogs started in the open and tracked up to the curb and then turned along the curb.  It was cooler, it had rained recently, and we aged it only 15 minutes.  Since we run the tracks in reverse order from how they are laid, the first one is 15 minutes and each one gets a little older.  I asked Nadine to shoot one long video including all four tracks and the time walking between them, which was just over 5 minutes.  So I know the first track was aged 15 minutes and the fourth track was aged about 20 minutes.

Here is a little video of Gimme doing her set of 4 tracks.  Right Turns Against the Curb video  You'll see she isn't quite tracking at the start of her first track, but she gets better with each one.  Right as we start the second track a woman walks by and Gimme didn't even notice her.  This time she tracked right from the start, but overran the curb into the landscaping.  Lots of people in motorhomes park overnight in this parking lot and walk their dogs, so I'm sure she was reading pee-mail.  I kept pressure on the line until she got out of the landscaping and back to tracking.  The third track she did nicely and didn't get sucked into pee-mail and made a very nice turn.  On the fourth track Gimme overran the turn, but did a very nice job self-correcting and getting right on the track.

Overall I think she liked this exercise and it was the right level of difficulty.  So next time we do it, I want to age 20 minutes, which will make the last track 25 minutes old.  Gimme sure does love to use her nose.