Hill Reps

Posted on March 29, 2008 by Leanne

The amount of exercise our dogs has increased every year we’ve had them, so far. I think we’ve finally found the human saturation point, because there aren’t enough hours in the day, but it’s definitely not the dog saturation point. Dylan still throws his toys about like a lunatic at 9pm.

During the week …

AM: 1x30minute walk, almost entirely free running. They have their leads on to cross the road there and back, and that’s it.

AM/PM: 1×30 minute walk, again almost entirely free running, OR 15mins agility or flyball training (not always over equipment).

PM: 1×45-60minute walk, free running again.

On weekends, they’re at flyball training from 9am ’til 12pm Saturday, although they’re only actually running for 2×15-20min sessions, and that depends on exactly what we’re working on. On Sunday they either get a 60-90 minute walk in the afternoon which replaces the 30minute walk in the normal routine, or Kim and Dylan go agility training for an hour or so. Mollie gets a day of rest, but she’s an older lady!

Tuesdays and Wednesdays during the summer they skip the evening walk, as it’s agility (Tues) and flyball (Wed) training. Mollie doesn’t do agility, but she more than makes up for it at flyball the day after! Evening walk is usually a bit shorter on Fridays, probably about 30mins, especially if we’re competing the next day.

In addition to all that, all three now do a handful of hill reps. This is, apparently, the most fun in the world. Not quite as much fun as flyball, which is the most fun ever imagined anywhere in the universe, but pretty good. Hill reps, for those of you who don’t do athletics (or have family members that do!), is a fairly simple concept. You work on the uphill for 30 seconds, jog back down, power up hill for 30 seconds, jog back down, and so on. Builds up stamina, strength and speed. You increase the number of repetitions depending on your fitness.

We started doing this earlier this week for two reasons. A) Give Mollie an extra workout, and B) encourage Dylan’s chase/race instincts. Me at the bottom of the hill, mother at the top with the precious toy. I hold all three dogs (which isn’t as difficult as it sounds!) and then release them, individually or in pairs, about 0.5-1 second apart. Dylan goes second or last, never first at the moment.

Our hill is about 75m from bottom to top, it’s reasonably steep but not ridiculous. It’s about 10 mins into our walk so the dogs have warmed up properly, and we currently do 3-4 reps, and then carry on. Hill reps are only part of the evening walk, but now the favourite part. As soon as we get to the hill the dogs all shoot off to the bottom and wait for everyone to get into position. Clever dogs!

This is a pretty boring post, but I’ll let you know if the hill reps seem to have made a difference when we get to Middlesbrough in May, and hopefully get back under 20seconds.

How to Make Homemade Agility Jumps (Part One)

Posted on March 27, 2008 by Leanne

With pictures!

We bought our wood from B&Q yesterday, and it cost the princely sum of £11.47 (the nails cost the most, typically!) and we bought treated timber. Each peice is 2.4m long, and we bought three 5cm x 2.5cm, two 3.5 x 2.5, and two 10 x 2.5 planks. This easily made us 2 jumps (4 wings), and we didn’t need to use the second 10 x 2.5 of wood — although it came in useful later (see Part Two!).

The main upright post (5 x 2.5), which will have the jump cups on, is 90cm high.

The back post (5 x 2.5), the smaller upright, is 50cm high.

The two bottom horizontal peices (one on each side for stability, 3.5 x 2.5) are 45cm. This gives us a fairly sturdy base and a tent-peg in the gap will hold the jump upright if you’re on uneven ground or there’s a bit of a breeze. It would be very easy to add a peice across the front to create a stable cross peice if you live somewhere particularly subject to violent storms or just don’t have any tent-pegs.

The diagonal crosspeice (10 x 2.5) we measured against the frame of the first wing that we built. We found this was easier than trying to do maths and work out angles and so on. Once we’d measured and cut the first diagonal we just marked off the remaining three on the wood. (It ended up being 48.5cm).

We haven’t included the smaller uprights in the gap because they’re (as far as we can tell) purely decorative. They don’t add to the stability of the jump and it means we can save the wood for something more useful. It would be fairly easy to include them though, they’d slot in easily between the bottom two peices.

We debated about using glue as well as nails to secure all the peices, but in the end we decided against it. The jumps that Katie made a few months ago used glue and nails, but as the jumps live outside, it meant that the glue just didn’t hold.

We also debated about jump cups. We thought about making our own out of the wood that we had left, and in the end decided it was easier and less dangerous for us (we’re not great with a jigsaw) to buy 10 pairs of pre-made jump cups from Jump4Joy on ebay. That brought our total cost to £28.42, but even with 4 cups (35, 45, 55 and 65cm heights) on each wing we will have some spare cups for any future jump-making escapades.

The final thing we debated was paint, and we still haven’t decided on that. We want to keep costs down but these jumps have to live outdoors for the most part, but varnish is a bit boring and generally quite expensive, but the suitability of paint is currently a bit of an unknown. We’re looking into it.

You may notice Mollie is attempting to get in on some of the pictures. Mollie enjoys all kinds of DIY and gardening, and without her running off with bits of wood, throwing her toys at us, knocking over the freshly-made wings, and forcing someone to stand guard to make sure she didn’t attack the electric saw, we couldn’t have made these jumps. Thank you, Mollie.

Click here for How to Make Homemade Agility Jumps (Part Two).

Go Team!

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Leanne

It seems whilst we had an average weekend, everyone else went off and won things! My biggest congratulations to Alice and her gorgeous Cocker/Springer Spaniel Sammy who won the NAWS Class B Medium/Small Championship. Sammy is not the easiest dog in the world, he’s very all-or-nothing, but he finished up this weekend by winning the Agility and Jumping. I’m so pleased for them!

Also got the results back from the second two days of Carlton Towers. Night Owlers finished up winning their division, and Eagle Owlers also did great, coming 3rd in their division. And then Owlers’ superstar Whippet Murphy stepped up to join Doncaster for the Multi-breed on Monday, who also won their division.

Mollie wasn’t herself for a couple of days when we got back, I think she probably got whatever Kim had, and it explains why she wasn’t quite her speedy self at Selby. She wouldn’t even eat the turkey leftovers on Monday. She’s definitely back to normal now though, she’s been chasing Kim around the house and attacking any cleaning appliances such as vacs and mops.

The plan for the rest of the day is to try and make the jump wings I’ve been promising myself I’ll do this holiday. The only problem I’m having is with the feet … what’s the best way to make them fall over if a dog hits them, but sturdy enough to withstand a small gale?! I’ll report back later with photos and measurements for any budding agility DIY-ists out there.

Carlton Towers Flyball

Posted on March 23, 2008 by Leanne

Well, I’ve never flyballed in the snow before.

Barking Owlers came 2nd in their Division, although to be honest we really didn’t expect to. The Beardies came into season this week and had to drop out, so we were left with four competitive dogs, plus Chewy. On the day, we also lost one of our handlers as Craig was called into work after the first race, so we had to bring in someone who had never handled in open competition before, and had never run Meg. Jo’s Dad did brilliantly considering, but obviously we weren’t as gelled as normal and Meg had to run as lead dog, which she doesn’t like, and Mollie had to run as second dog, which she doesn’t like!

Kim ran brilliantly all day, she was absolutely faultless. I couldn’t have asked for more from her! But as a team we just couldn’t muster much enthusiasm and the tournament just wasn’t that great. We ran some miserable times, I think our fastest was 20.55 and our slowest was over 22 seconds, which was very disappointing from a team that normally runs sub-20. We were really hoping to get Mollie the 204points she needed for her Graduate award, and we just scraped it; thanks to Julie for counting up at the end, and Jane for offering to get her a few runs at Drax if she hadn’t made it. Go the Mol! Our division was also cut to the minimum of 4 teams as Dog Friendly and Hillam had to pull out at the last minute due to Kennel Cough, so even our 2nd place didn’t feel like much of an achievement.

Video to come …

I was scribing for Barney Owlers in Division 1 who were also down to 4 dogs, as Norah the SuperBeardie was out along with our Buffy. Jet had to step in as lead dog, with a completely new handler who had never done the lights before! Having said that, James got some awesome start times, cutting it down to get a best of 0.01 … impressive! The team did an 18.46 but were mainly running low 19 second times most of the day, which again was disappointing. Jet tried her best but she just wasn’t running the kind of times she normally does, being off by 0.4-6 seconds, but I think she found it hard work running in all the heats. It’s a lot of fun getting to be on the line though!

Dylan also got to play at CleverDogs! I was more interested in letting him work on different equipment than really going for a time with him, which worked out quite well because we only got one recorded time in the end! He clocked a 23.– in the Starters division, not too bad. I was more concerned that he ran the course well, and he did, but boy was he a tired dog! Nothing like his normal speed and enthusiasm. Teams are allowed some time to practise on the course before being timed, so I got a chance to play with Dylan a bit first. I really need to work on being clearer with my commands, but we got some work done on rear crosses and I even layered in a jump at one point, which Dylan didn’t mind at all, although it didn’t exactly achieve the intended and Dyl still took off back towards the weaves!

The CleverDogs was being run by some of the people from the British Agility Association, and I’m apparently a recognisable name now because I was asked whether Dylan was the dog I won everything with or if I had another. I had to confess Dylan was only the baby and Kim was off flyballing today, otherwise she’d have come and done some CleverDogs too.

The weather was awful all day, but we clearly didn’t have the worst of it. All the outdoor agility shows have been cancelled, including the huge Dashin Dogs show. But the tournament just felt very ‘meh’ … nobody could muster any enthusiasm to run, possibly because so often we were against an empty lane, but mainly because the atmosphere was just dead. Other teams seemed to be feeling the same way as us, and I’m not sure if we’ll be doing Carlton Towers next year. The first year I went (2004), Kim was running in her first ever open tournament and we came 3rd in the division, only to be told that the rosettes weren’t available and we wouldn’t get any. I know there are problems with every tournament but that was the standard the first year I went, and it seems to have got worse every year since. There are other competitions on Easter Weekend and right now, even the cancelled ones seem more appealing!

I got three lights for early changovers too, which is appalling. I haven’t done that for months!

Thanks to Cat Clark of http://www.themodernlove.co.uk/ for providing the photos of Dylan in this post and the last, and for the videos. Also thanks to Jess for allowing us to borrow her camera to film the Barking Owlers.

Carlton Towers Starters

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Leanne

The boy did good … ish!

Our lovely team the Little Owlers were in Division A, and we won two of six heats so not too shabby! We weren’t the fastest team in the world as we weren’t really bothering with changeovers, but all our dogs ran brilliantly

Dylan handled the pressure fantastically, he took it all in his stride and was absolutely raring to go. He was even running some fairly close changeovers with Amber towards the end, with only a bit of hesitation. He’s going to be pretty quick when he gets going too, which is great!

The only problem we had today was his box, and I’m really disappointed. All the training we’ve done just went completely out the window, he was effectively stopping in front of the box and taking the ball out before turning round, which of course messed up his stride for the return runs. Julie and I spent quite a while debating what to do! I think it’s going to be pretty much what I’d expected, which is to pull Dylan from all possible competitions until his box is perfect. I’m not willing to ruin his chance to have a perfect swimmer’s turn just to get some points or whatever — because he can do the turn, and it is absolutely perfect when he does it!

Anyway, video! It’s pretty noisy (as flyball always is!) so be careful if you have the speakers on. Also, keep an eye on the other lane in the first race, you might spot the stunning Elliot from Ruffdogs kicking our ass.

http://www.undermybed.co.uk/images/littleowlers.wmv

(This video may go up on youTube sometime next week … for now it’s only available via the download link. It’s quite a big file, just to warn!)

There’s another version of the same first race here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pUfb0FlnAAU

The undoubted star of the day was Chip, who just got better and better and better. He was unbelievably focussed and he an old pro at recalls and changeovers by the end of the day! He is going to be a serious one-to-watch, I can’t wait to see some Chip/Murphy Lurcher Pairs later this year.