A thing my wife and I do is share the cadence with our dogs. We work the cadence for any exercise, even a round of fetch.

This seems to pay off well, as our dogs are learning to match their surge to the cadence. It is a cool thing to feel your dog explode from the “blocks” in synchronicity with your cadence. (We can invent words in blogs, right?)

Your insight on selecting a starting mark will be helpful.

I can attest to the difficulty in gauging a dog going over jumps – really short dogs, especially.