Running A-Frame

You know that moment when you realize you might actually be insane? Well mine wasn't when I decided I was going to purposely buy a greyhound puppy for agility, or even when I decided to get a SECOND greyhound puppy for agility... it was a few months ago when I said to my agility trainer: "You know, I think I want to retrain my A-frame from stopped to running." That, my friends, is the definition of insanity. Trading in a 100% stopped contact behaviour that gives you a place to catch up with your dog, for a running contact which even at its most reliable is probably only 95% and makes you have to run so much more.

Not only are we talking about retraining a solid, well understood behaviour, but a running contact also requires the handler to retrain themselves in how to handle.

We had a private lesson on December 13, 2018 on how to convert to a running frame. 3 weeks later we had our first trial. It's still a journey in progress, but I thought I'd share our progress to this point. I had very bravely filled our January with trials, so we'll see how those go before we start signing up for February!

This was the first session we had after our lesson. We started by back-chaining... just putting her on the down ramp of the frame and asking her to step into the yellow and off. After a few repetitions of that we started doing the entire frame. I'm also using her release word to let her know she doesn't have to stop, and she's still not totally confident so there's a bit of hesitation. The bar or "stride regulator" gives her a target that her second stride needs to be below. Basically she needs to put in 2 strides.

This is the second week of training. I've been noticing that on many of the attempts without the stride regulator her stride is quite short and so even though she's put in the second stride, she's only just barely hitting the top of the yellow. The goal is for us to get all 4 feet in the yellow - 2 front feet followed by 2 back feet. When she hits high she's often only hitting with 2 feet. To try to help with this I've been adding in a wicket at the base of the frame. Typically you train a running frame with one method - people either subscribe to the wicket or the stride method. But heck, I'm already doing insane things like training greyhounds in agility, so why stop there? When training an unconventional dog in an unconventional sport use unconventional methods! Like using BOTH a wicket AND a stride regulator!

The stride method basically teaches the dog to put in a certain number of strides in order to hit the yellow. For large dogs that's 2 strides, for smaller dogs it may be more (don't ask me how many more because I don't have any small dogs!). The wicket method is different in that the striding doesn't really matter. What the wicket does is forces the dog to drop its head, which in turn forces the dog to run lower on the frame.

For the most part I do like the striding method, but since she is hitting a bit high, I'm hoping that getting her to drop her head a bit will force her to lengthen that stride a bit. Right now I'm using the wicket for the first couple attempts, then ditching it for just the stride regulator, and then finally removing everything (or using the stride regulator on one side and nothing on the other).

It's a work in progress, but here was Kenna today debuting her new running frame at a trial. I had run her FEO in the run before this and just had her do the frame a few times and rewarded with a toy, just to remind her and see what she would do in a trial environment. She was hitting high but doing her job. The frame in the Standard run was by far her best one of the day.