When dog pulls down the hill
Then Nantucket sleigh ride
The other part of the running downhill question was what to do when the dog is pulling you down the hill. That’s no good. You can’t maintain form with Fido pulling.
Buddy does this to me. He has great downhill speed with his four legs and he likes to rocket down the hills. I find this rather disconcerting because I don’t want to brake on the down hills; I don’t want to dig in my heels and when the dog pulls it forces you to do just that.
It’s quite dangerous too because it pulls you off balance at a time when you are trying to maintain balance. In my case I’ve got the leash-end in one hand and he is pulling me by that hand while I’m trying to use my arms for balance.
What to do? Well, the best thing to do is train your dog not to pull on the leash, but many of us haven’t gotten that particular lesson 100% burned in yet. Running downhill with the dog is fairly situational so I have developed some situational tactics to deal with it.
First you have to have a verbal command that means “Stop pulling on the damn leash”. The verbal command I use is “EASY!” Typically the verbal command alone won’t send the message strongly enough. So you have to reinforce the verbal command with what the trainers call a physical correction.
The physical correction is a sharp jerk on the leash. You use the verbal command at the same time you give the correction “Easy!” – Bang! The two reinforce each other.
The way to make this work when you’re running is to use the natural back swing of your arm motion for the correction. On the first backswing give a hard correction and use the verbal command. Then on subsequent backswings you can reinforce it a little to let the dog know where the slack is in the leash.
Dogs will try to run with some tension on the leash and this doesn’t work well with your arm swing. By giving that little correction on the backswing you can give the dog feedback as to where the slack zone is in the leash.
In the worst case you may have to just stop. It’s not safe to be careening out of control down a hill with your dog dragging you.
Hope that helps. Run safe and I’ll see you out there.