On Thursday, December 19th, Nadine and I met at Game Farm Park. It was cold, breezy and damp. I asked Nadine to create a TDU-like track, to prepare us for the test we entered for January 1st. We aged the track 2 hours.
I was hopeful we'd do well, but this was not the reassuring track I wanted. Gimme started well, but when we approached the area of the first turn there were too-friendly women tramping all over the corner and a man passed nearby with his dog (pink squiggle, top of photo). This was very distracting for Gimme. Once they moved on she was able to make the turn. However, she tracked with a wide serpentine down the second leg (lime green). A woman walked her dog down the cement path to our left as we tracked (pink squiggle, right of track) and a man was playing with two young children to the right of our track (big pink squiggle, center of photo).Gimme continued the serpentine down the length of the second leg and overran the corner. The overrun made it all the way to the cement path ahead of us - about 20 yards. Gimme didn't try to cross the path and started searching around. As we moved back toward where she'd been solid, she picked up the third leg and followed it.
She did a great job passing through the stonehenge rock formation and making the turn right afterward. The track actually passed through the wood chips of the playground, but Gimme stayed up on the cement path, moving around the playground and picking up the track where it exited. She was going a bit too fast and overran the last turn, then self-corrected, circled back, and picked up the turn. From there she crossed the cement path and went right to the final article hidden behind the exposed roots of a tree.
Overall Gimme did well. She had difficulty recovering from the distraction near the first corner, as well as ignoring distraction on the second leg. People and dogs are always "enticing" for her, so it's something we'll need to work on.
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