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.