As you may already know if you follow us on Instagram, we attended a few weeks ago a workshop about urban mushing. This was a really nice day and we learnt a lot.

We had a class in the morning, to learn the theory, and be able to ask any questions we had. Then in the afternoon we headed out to the street to practice the commands while walking. We finished the day by a walk on a nice trail to learn passing other dogs and being passed.

During this workshop, we learnt how to warm up and cool down with the pup. We also learnt that keeping a training book and video recording your trainings is important. This way you can look back at your training, see what went well and what went wrong, and keep track of your progress. For us, we use the training book and GoPro recording of our trainings to share and review the training with each other. Because we both run with Luna, we need to be consistent in our training, and it is also really interesting to have someone else looking at your training from a fresh eye. We can thus point out a few things that the runner did not see during his training.

We also learnt the importance of group training, to work on distractions with other dogs, passing and being passed, which is the conditions of a race. We learnt how to prepare for a race: from having a training plan, to what to do pre and post race. One of the important point was to set a goal for your training. Just as you would prepare for a runner race, you would prepare for a race with your dog the same way.

Then this is when you can follow the rest of our training via the video below.

By the end of the day, we graduated! It was a nice workshop, we learnt a lot and we are ready to become canicross champions!!