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!

Tough day for fatman Dylan today! Flyball training in the morning and then an agility training afternoon over in York. Ideally I would have skipped flyball, but we have Drax coming up and I really want him fit and ready. We’re making an effort to do more two lane training at the moment, and it’s making Dylan work really hard. He has a habit of lazing around in training when on a single lane, so running him against the faster dogs pulls him on and makes him put some effort in. He was stretching like mad against Jet; he was going 110% and she was cruising at 80%, and she still beat him by a nose. Poor lad, no wonder he has an inferiority complex, he’s constantly getting his ass kicked by girls.

So he had a hard flyball session, and then I whisked him off to agility! I’d booked onto a training day with Dawn and Katie Long, since loads of people have recommended Dawn to me recently and when the opportunity came up I was about ready to snap Julie’s hand off! I had a great time and it was well worth it, so I can safely say I’ll be furthering the recommendations.

We did a lot of work on contacts, which was great for me and Dylan. Particularly for me! I’ve always been fairly confident in Dylan’s understanding of the 2o2o position, but I’ve never dared to truly test it. Well, I got put on the spot, and Dylan was brilliant, so I’m very very pleased. He drove to the end regardless of where I was, and only looked around for me once he’d stopped. His Aframe was especially good; I raced him to the start of the Aframe, and then stopped completely before the up-ramp and let Dylan complete by himself. He nailed it every time, and only peered around once to check where I was (and he left a toe on the bottom … cheating slightly!) Spent plenty of time getting him to really drive over the dogwalk, and some new techniques for getting him more confident on the seesaw, so very positive.

We also spent some time working on weave entries and truly independent weaves, which again was great for me and Dylan, because he was awesome! More about my handling than anything, and Dylan was pretty exhausted by this part of the session, but he’s always willing to try.

I didn’t learn anything which is going to fundamentally change the way I handle or train. But I’m viewing that a positive thing. Means we’re doing something right!

It’s been a long while since I’ve looked at Dylan’s obstacle times. A whole year, in fact!

As always, brutally honest times taken from the moment of first contact with the obstacle to the moment the front paw(s) hit the ground. Averages in bold, all times taken from competition runs within the last three months only.

Dogwalk: 2.87 [3.39] (2.87, 3.00, 2.60, 2.46, 3.00, 2.96, 3.20)
Aframe: 1.53 [2.36] (1.60, 1.67, 1.60, 1.34mc, 1.46)
Seesaw: 1.73 [1.95] (1.80, 1.91, 1.54, 1.86, 1.53)

Averages from the last time I took them are in square brackets (that’s Jan 09, apart from the Aframe, which is from Sept 08), and the improvement is fairly noticable. The actual improvement though is in the consistency of the times; a year ago we had variations of up to 4s between times. That Aframe in particular is getting nailed, these days, although contact reliability has slipped from 100% to 90%, hence that little “mc” mark. Seesaw times are looking good, could be a little better but nothing I’m overly worried about right now.

That 2.46 in the Dogwalk times is making me very happy. I would estimate that Dyl runs 2.20 in training, and that 2.46 suggest we’re finally, slowly, making the transition to the ring. On the other hand, we still have plenty of 3s runs in there, so we have a lot of work to do yet! The average is better than it was, but still nowhere near where I would like it to be. We need consistent 2.4s to be anywhere like competitive enough for a G3 win.

No 12 weaves times because we haven’t done 12 weaves very often recently! Possibly because indoor shows sometimes can’t peg them, but judges just don’t seem to be including the weaves all that often anyway at the moment.

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.