Weaves

Posted on November 30, 2007 by Leanne

Really made some progress with the weaves today. I took them back to being about 3/4″ apart, and worked on entries first. We finished with a couple of 20ft run-ins, very pleased with that! Clean Run had a useful article in October that I’ve only just got around to reading, I’d never thought about doing long-distance weave entries.

I’ve been holding the width at about 2/3″ for about a month now, because Dylan has to do the actual weaving motion at that gap, but he can still see the channel. Today I decided to move them in about an inch, so it was perhaps 1″ apart. Big step! Luckily Dylan worked it nicely! He started off with a couple of pop-outs but once he’d adjusted his stride slightly he was fine. He really drives through; I’ve got some lovely V-poles now where he’s bent the base!

I’m learning a lot more about how he works too. He missed the entry completely a couple of times when he got his stride wrong, which is something Kim has never done. I think he’s finding it hard to collect his stride sometimes, which means it’s back to doing some caveletti work! I also wonder though if he is finding it hard to judge how much he should collect/extend by to hit the first pole right. I’m not sure how to teach him to make the mental adjustments – maybe a “steady” command? Something to think about anyway.

Kim is at Wyre tomorrow, and Mollie is flyballing at Doncaster on Sunday. I’m so glad my lectures have finished, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get up on Monday morning! I don’t expect we’ll be finished at Wyre until 6pm at the earliest, and then it’s 90min drive home. We’ll probably finish racing at Donny at 8:30pm, which means we won’t be home until 10:30. And 7am set-off both days … well, at least we’ll wear the tall-boy out.

Dylan’s See Saw

Posted on November 27, 2007 by Leanne

Dylan went to Wakefield this weekend on his own, which was a very enlightening experience! He definitely doesn’t get as worked up when he’s training on his own, but he still finds the whole thing quite exciting. It was definitely an afternoon of ups and downs – the weaves and the seesaw went brilliantly, but we lost some of the basics.

Positives? I had several comments on how well Dyl was working the weaves , and I was generally very pleased. Twelve channel weaves, starting off at about 4″ apart, then narrowed to 2/3″. We had a couple of pop-outs but it wasn’t his fault. I’m hoping I might be able to borrow Katie‘s set of channels and hopefully get him going through the standard set by the New Year.

We did a bit of the seesaw last time, but Dylan and the seesaw didn’t exactly get off to a flying start. I was kind of preparing myself to have another couple of weeks of very slow introduction, coaxing him to the end until he gets his confidence up. We started in a very similar way on Sunday, with fewer people, and me holding his collar. A few repetitions and then back onto some jumping exercises. Towards the end I managed to get another couple of minutes on the seesaw, and the tall boy managed to surprise me! I had no-one helping me the second time, so I held the seesaw myself, lowering it when he got onto the contact. After a couple of careful attempts, Dylan suddenly clicked and started completely ignoring the movement and me, only interested in the treats! On his final go I was barely slowing the seesaw at all, and I left it at that. Very pleased! I was planning on going with a 4-on for the seesaw, but Dylan wanted to do a 2o/2o and so I’ll do that instead since he’s obviously happy with it, and he’s adjusting for any bounce-back off the impact which negates any worries I had.

His dogwalk and Aframe contacts were pretty good. Had a few creepy bits on the Aframe but nothing I’m overly worried about.

Negatives: Well, after happily doing the tyre all session he completely freaked out on the last go, for no reason that I (or anybody else) could see. We finally got him back through it, and hopefully it will all be forgotten by next time (too optimistic on my part!?) but it had me worried. He also took a random dislike to one of the jumps for a while and kept going under the pole, definitely not a habit I want to encourage. He cured himself of that later by deciding it would be nice to take it on the way to the dogwalk, at a steep angle, and cleared it beautifully.

He’s in for a busy weekend, coming to Wyre at Myerscough with Kim on Saturday, and possibly to Doncaster with his favourite girl Jet on Sunday.

Friday

Posted on November 23, 2007 by Leanne

Friday is my day off from university, so I was able to fit some training in with Kim and Dylan. Actually, there are two things wrong with that sentence! I am supposed to use Fridays for catching up with reading and prep-work, so it’s not really a day off, and when I say “training” … well, I managed to do a bit of work in the yard with 1 jump, 1 cavaletti pole, and a tunnel.

I wanted to work on Kim’s directionals, tighter turns and her “out” command. We only did 5 mins or so on directionals because I thought she’d need a reminder, but she really didn’t. The same for her “out” command; we only spent a couple of minutes on it. Kim has always had a very strong out command, but I’ve hardly used it over the past couple of months (haven’t needed to!). It doesn’t seem to have mattered, she worked both her directionals and the outs great. She’s such a smart cookie! We spent a bit longer on wrapping the jump wing, since it’s a bit of an issue for us. It’s going to be one of the constants that we can always improve on I think. Unfortunately Kim always kicks into another gear at competitions, so although I might think she’s improving at home, she’s running twice as fast at shows and it always ruins my timing!

Dylan worked on gridwork and cavaletti mainly. One of the exercises we did last weekend was a circle of 7 jumps, unevenly spaced, and we ran the full circle twice, and Dyl had one or two poles down both times. I’m not sure whether he’s just dropping that cautious jumping style now that he’s getting more confident, misjudging his takeoffs, or whether it might have been the ground, which was very wet and slippy. It rained the whole time we were training, and the grass is still a bit thin at Wakefield. We were more successful today and didn’t get any poles down, so I practised some rear crosses too. Confessions time: for the first few attempts I couldn’t figure out why he was spinning after the jump, and then I realised I was giving him a “right” command to turn left. No wonder the poor boy is so confused!

Anyway, I was really pleased with both pooches today. Dylan is beginning to speed up and work confidently, which is nice. I’m not sure he’s ever going to be fast enough to win out of (for example) Grade 3, but he’s going to be a fantastic dog to run.

Flyball tomorrow morning, which should be fun! Unfortunately we had to pull Mollie out of training last week as she developed a limp, but she’s sound as a bell since Sunday and we’ll give her another shot this week. She was not best pleased! But she’s not as young as she used to be, and 2008 may be her last real year of competition, although if Mollie has any say in the matter she’d flyball until her legs dropped off.

Barking Dogs

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Leanne

There’s a bit of a debate over on the Agility Forum at the moment about dogs barking in queues at competitions.

If I have a quiet Kim on my hands, I know we’re not going to have a good run. So I want her to bark. I have a dog who isn’t always hyper-motivated (or even slightly motivated!) to work, and one of my sure fire ways to get her revved up is to ask her to “speak”. I can make her shut up again, but I don’t want to.

Having said that, I never queue, I always get someone else to do it for me until the dog before me is running, when I swap places. I appreciate that not everyone wants to wind their dogs up before they run like I do, and I always take Kim as far away as possible from the queue and the ring to get her wound up and ragging on her toy. I know it’s not perfect, and she could still be a distraction for the dog running, or for dogs in the queue. But everyone has their pre-run rituals – some people ask their dogs to do heelwork, or downs/sits/waits, some people calm their dogs down, some people just ignore their dogs completely. And this is mine!

I suppose the issue with Kim isn’t that she’s barking and I can’t stop her, it’s that she’s barking and I don’t want to stop her. (Well, at agility. I can’t stop her at flyball, but I still want a barking dog!). It tells me that she’s happy and enjoying herself, and that she’s going to run at least one or two of her socks off, if not all of them. How do you feel about barking dogs?

Agility Training

Posted on November 16, 2007 by Leanne

It’s been a frustrating couple of days with Dylan. I’ve been really happy with his contact work until now; he has been extremely good with the 2o/2o on the dogwalk, and his 4off for the Aframe has been working really well. I have to admit I had slacked off on practising the 4off touch-target behaviour, because we don’t have an Aframe at home and our staircase isn’t suitable for working on (ever seen a collie run down a flight of stairs onto a laminate floor leading to a solid wood door?), and I want him to associate the Aframe with the behaviour. I learnt my lesson about that last night. I decided to just do a bit of target-touch work, and Dylan just looked at me blankly and then made his own game up, which included licking the target so it would stick to his tongue and then flicking it across the room. He eventually remembered what it was about and by the end we had some lovely nose-touch downs going on, but I have to keep reminding myself that he is not Kim. Once Kim has learnt something, she’s learnt it, and she doesn’t forget it. Dylan obviously doesn’t work in the same way – either that or his target work just wasn’t as sound as I thought it was.

So that’s one problem. The other is that Dylan has decided to lie down on the contact whilst he’s doing his 2o/2o. He’s still doing what I want him to do, technically, but I don’t want him to lie down. I’m also wondering whether I might have proofed it too well (bet you don’t hear that complaint very often!) because he’s reluctant to leave the contact until he’s been there a couple of seconds, even with tunnels and jumps and other exciting obstacles tempting him. I have a feeling that will disappear as his confidence grows though, so I’m not complaining too much.

Final problem is with Kim, although it’s not so much a problem as a potential breakthrough. You all know how many issues we’ve had this summer with the dogwalk contact, either missing it completely or creeping the downplank and then missing it anyway, unless I’m in exactly the right place at the right time. Today, for the first time, I had her running it smoothly with no hesitations, and hitting the contact 95% of the time. I always wish I’d taught Kim proper contacts, but when she started neither of us knew what we were doing and neither did our “trainers”. By the time I’d realised what I should have been doing with her, I’d decided it wasn’t worth retraining her. I still stand by that. I know her well enough to know that she will never do a 2o/2o, 4off, 1RTO, whatever, and hit&miss running contacts are my only hope.