I was greatly encouraged by all of the comments after my last post about training a running partner! Thank you for the helpful hints. As you can tell, I am new at this!
Today, we took a different trail (the hilly one) and Willie did great! He loved it because we didn’t encounter many people and there weren’t as many bikes for distraction. I took him off leash when we were back in the trail away from the main road and he stayed right with me.
We did hit a couple of abrupt stops when we came to the first bridge. He sat down and looked up at me saying, “I don’t do bridges.” He hadn’t even gotten close enough to see if the holes were wide enough apart or not. He somehow just know that something was ahead that he didn’t like.
The same came when we encountered the stone stairs and I’ll have to agree with him that they were too steep for him to climb or go down, at least for this week.
And finally, we came to some grates that were put in to reduce flooding and he made it over the first one fine, but then one of his front paws when through the second one. We learned very quickly how to go around those!
Overall, I am quite impressed with little man. He is learning quickly and seems to have a lot of fun. I think this bodes well for our running/hiking future together : )