Tracking (35)

This is the first time we've tracked since Gimme got her TD in November.  Nadine had some other things going on and I was very busy at work.  Gimme is not impressed with either excuse.

Conditions were icy-cold.  The ground was frozen solid... even the mole-hills were like concrete.  There was no breeze to speak of.  I don't have distances for the legs, but this is a good representation.  It was about 45 minutes old.

Gimme was very eager to get started on this track.  She wanted to do it without any delay, such as pottying.  I had some difficulty convincing her we didn't need to run full out.  A very good decision, since the frozen ground was very unforgiving and it was too easy to catch a foot on some concrete-dirt and go down, which Nadine did.  The black block is the start sock and red blocks are articles.

Gimme did well on all the field portions.  She overran the second turn and took a little bit to sort it out, but then was solid.  The dashed line shows where she knew the turn was there and I didn't believe her.  Nadine said she put in a road crossing for us and I had it in my head it would be straight ahead coming down the hill.  Gimme cooperated with me and then just kept pulling me right until she got us both on the track.  You have to love her persistence.  She had trouble with the two road crossings.  She spent a long time on the first one before she finally decided to sniff on the pavement.  The article there was at the foot of a telephone pole.  From there she was quite willing to track along the side of the road and back to the cars, ignoring the second road crossing.

Really I was pleased with her efforts, given we haven't been tracking in two months.  Our plan is to mostly focus on urban, following Sil's plan to the letter.  I want to start over, back at the very baby stuff.  Gimme has developed a tendency to "go visual" when tracking on pavement gets challenging, so I want to resolve this and build a better foundation.  One of the things we have to do is make sure she can't see food drops, so we'll be using beef jerky, which blends in with the pavement much better than cheese. 

At the same time we'll be doing field tracking as needed while Nadine figures out which trial she will enter with Cricket.  Gimme and Cricket were in the same trial, but Cricket got a more challenging field.  She doesn't have Gimme's persistence, so she got the dreaded whistle right after the first turn.  When we are doing field tracking, we'll be introducing some TDX challenges for Gimme.