The gang had a good morning flyballing … in the rain. Where has my nice summer weather gone?!

Dylan was all over the place with his training. He ran terribly in the first session, really slow and bad bad box, but he ran much better in the second session. We did have two lanes up though, but Dylan wasn’t running against anyone, and I wonder if he thought he got a free pass to be lazy. Must work on that … Kim was grumpily playing stooge dog for Biba all morning, and Mollie only got one session as she came up slightly sore mid-way through.

Two of my friend’s lost their dogs in this past week; both to different cancers, and both way too young. I want to tell them both they I’m thinking of them and their dogs, but find it difficult to think of anything good enough to say. What can you say? I can only hope that they know my feeble “I’m sorry”’s are heartfelt, although insufficient.

For Moss (2005-2010) and Mishka (2003-2010).

The gang did well at flyball this week. Kim did 6 runbacks, just over 12″, to ease her gently back into things. She’s back on non-lead walks, except for the first 15minutes where everyone goes absolutely loopy and they chase each other around at top speed. Kim has to be restrained to avoid that, and is not happy about it.

Mollie got a really great session down, she worked over 14″ for most of the session, dropping to 12″ at the end. Fingers crossed she gets lots of lead slots over the next few tournaments, she runs so well in front and I think she’s fit enough to handle it at the moment.

Dylan’s box needs work. It’s something like a three footed turn at the moment, which I am not happy about. Not only that, but because he isn’t getting his back end around tightly enough, he’s pushing off from way too low down which is pushing him wide off the turn. When he gets it right, he flips around neatly and it makes a noticable difference to his speed (of course!). He actually ran much better in training than he did at Drax last week, nowhere near as wide from the box and had one or two really nice turns.

On the other hand, he is looking super fit and fast over 14″, which is excellent since we don’t have a height dog right now!

Unfortunately we don’t have any tournaments for a while, we’re missing the next two because of Redcar (Northern Festival of Agility). Still, that gives us plenty of time to work on Dylan’s box turn!

Dylan was really rocking his jumping this week, I was a very happy bunny! Lovely and smooth, confident, and extended. I don’t think his take off points are right so we do have to do more work on that.

Only one minor issue when he nearly backflipped over a jump, and I have genuinely no idea how he managed it. I can only assume (?) that he either tried to throw in an extra stride and then severely misjudged it, or tried to avoid me and propped with his front legs and lost it with his rear. We both recovered and carried on and no harm done, he bounced back quickly enough. I actually think the main thing was because of his aversion to knocking poles, he’d rather jump six foot too high to recover than knock the pole and land safely.

Fab weave entries, absolutely no popping regardless of whatever I was doing. Lovely! We’ve also done plenty of work on seesaw confidence, which seems to be paying off now. I keep trying to mix up doing early releases, quick releases and holding his contacts, which seems to be working. I really do love how happy Dyl is with his contact position, he really smiles at me when he’s stood waiting for his release … at which point I usually have to wait until he’s looking for the next obstacle, which is what he should be doing, but he does make me smile as well!

I’m feeling much more confident about sending Dylan and letting him roll. That’s definitely a result of the training day we were on a couple of weeks ago, it really showed me that Dylan does know what he’s doing and I can just leave him to get on with it!

I’m struggling a bit with training at the moment, so I’m actually kind of glad flyball training was rained off this morning.

Dyl and I had a bad training session on Tuesday, I guess like everyone we have our off-weeks. I had some things I wanted to focus on, but Dyl just lazed around and despite my efforts he was a bit distracted all evening, not “working” the courses although he did everything I asked.

I actually feel like we need to get on some training days and get some fresh input, but it’s just not possible at the moment as I can’t ask my parents to give me lifts all the time, especially when we have so few free weekends.

We’re at Rotherham flyball next week, and I haven’t done any flyball training for three weeks. I don’t really care! I love running my dogs in flyball, but I find team training (changeovers!) to be really dull. I know a lot of people find judging changes to be really difficult, but I just don’t find it that hard! One session before a tournament usually means I’ve got my eye in, although I do find that a lot of dogs run faster in competition anyway so you still have to be able to adjust. I’d rather work on boxwork or improving the actual individual run of the dog (either to the box or away), but we don’t seem to have much time for it at the moment.

Entered the Northern Festival of Agility at Redcar, one of my favourite venues, and I’m envisaging rain all week but I really don’t mind. I don’t think anyone I know is going, and I’m kind of looking forward to spending the time by myself, just me and Dyl, some agility and the beach. Sounds perfect!

Dyl was fantastic in training this week. I’d be dancing if I knew he was going to run like that in competition, because it really was brilliant! Super smooth, super fast, and just smoked everything. We played weaves and jumping, and left the contacts alone for another week. I know I’m going to regret that (we really need to do some dogwalk training especially) but there’s only so much we can focus on in 45mins.

I did some weave games, since he popped those last two poles at the weekend, but I couldn’t get him to break out. He was also nailing his offside entries, even at 90-120, which was pretty awesome to watch. I’ve been quietly niggling at that one for a while, and I love it when the work pays off. By the end of the night I was sending him to 90 angles from around 20ft away, which was fun and meant I could be lazy.

We had some straightforward jumping sequences, and we also had a slice grid set up (which is now my new favourite exercise. It’s so much fun watching the dogs figure it out!). We worked the slice grid first, since I know this is something we have a problem with anyway. Dyl jumped it initially as he tends to in competition; cautious, tucked, collected strides. He got more and more confident every time, until the 5th time around when he blazed through, just as confident as Kim if not quite as smooth. He’s not fully extending over the angle yet but he was clearly figuring out what needed to go where and adjusting to it.

Same story with everything. Lots of lovely extended jumping, twisting into his wraps and actually moving with complete confidence and pace, and the more we did the smoother and more fluent Dyl’s jumping got. I can see a couple of lingering issues even when he’s moving and jumping as well as he is, and I think that’s probably the genuine source of his problems. He misjudges takeoff points occasionally, but because he’s rolling he just throws a massive jump in and stretches to clear it. I am currently theorising that in competition, because he’s not moving as fast, he doesn’t have the momentum to throw those big jumps in and save himself, so he instead he slams on the brakes, throws another stride in and then pops over. That would account for his over-collection on the ground and his compacted appearance when he’s jumping. I like this theory, it feels about right, but I have no idea how to improve it. More work needed, I think …