There was a brief discussion at the seminar regarding conditioning and fitness, although it wasn’t a feature. It did get me thinking though! One of the points emphasised is that flyball practice shouldn’t be fitness training, it should be purely about training the dogs to flyball. I’m not sure I entirely agree with that; I do think dogs should be fit and should be conditioned for flyball, but because of how we run in the UK, plenty of our dogs do need to have “jump fitness” as well, and you can only really get that through training over jumps. Because we change the heights of our hurdles throughout the day’s racing (Mol can go from running 9” to her full height of 13” from one leg to the next), our dogs have to be able to power into the jumps as well as run over them (ideal world would be flat running over everything because they would be conditioned to a fixed height). Having said all that, it was mentioned at the seminar that Rocket Relay have weekly training sessions on power jumping, and we tend to incorporate that into our usual training, so I suppose it’s swings and roundabouts really.

Getting back on topic, our dogs get a lot of exercise, but I was really left thinking about how I judge their levels of fitness, their recovery rates, and what we do to keep them conditioned when they aren’t training as often. We have always done a lot of hill reps with our dogs in winter, mainly because we live in the Pennines and it’s harder to find flat ground than it is hilly ground. This works for our dogs, although Mollie tends to see it as an opportunity to just bulldoze Kim and Dylan, and occasionally me and my mother as well (no excuse for age or sight as she’s always done it). But it’s quite hard to judge their recovery times from this as we do it mid-way through an hours walk, and they do 5-6 reps and that’s it.

So, Tuesdays and Thursdays is now controlled chuck-it day. Dylan gets to skip Tuesdays (as you can imagine, he’s thrilled about that!) as he has agility training on Tuesday, and Kim sometimes gets to skip if she’s training too. Thursday is Dylan and one of the girls, depending on who did what Tuesday. (Three dogs is hard to balance, I should definitely get another one). We walk the 800m up onto the nearest green, by which point the dogs are nicely walmed up and ready to roll. One toy gets thrown in one direction. Once that toy has been retrieved by one of the dogs and they’re both on their way back, the matching toy gets thrown in the other direction. I use two cage rugby balls for this, identical in size, otherwise we get fratching* over which toy is better. Both dogs run both ways, because most dogs will drop the toy they’ve got if you throw another one. I’ve been doing it this way so the dogs get a better run, instead of running 50m out and back, they run 50m then 100m the other way, then 50m back. Better! (I say I throw it 50m, that’s a very optimistic estimate and ignores the fact that one in three times, I throw it in a tree or something.)

We do 5 of these throws then have a 3-5 minute break, then another 5. That’s it so far because apparently my dogs are incredibly out of shape and can only manage this many before collapsing in a heap, but eventually they’ll do another 5 as well after another 5 minute break.

This is definitely a one or two dog game only; it wouldn’t be practical for me to take all three dogs. Apart from the potential collisions and accidents that would likely occur from three dogs all heading for the same toy (which is why I normally avoid chuck-it games like the plague), it would get too uncontrolled. The obvious example is that Kim is a firm believer in her own self-importance, so she’ll hang back and let the collies race to the toy, which means she gets less work done. Likewise, Dylan tends to go into herding mode and will do 4 times the amount of running everyone else does, which makes it very hard to measure his fitness.

*my computer informs me that this isn’t a word, which is a lie. It is a word, although it might only be a British or possibly even Yorkshire word. It means something like snipe or bicker. I wouldn’t usually bother explaining but the computer is fairly adamant.