Trial Ready

It is done. All that is left this week is to tweak the little things and load the motor coach to go.  Our first agility trial will be a week from today.  Holy smokes, the time has flown!

The following shots were captured from video taken of us on Saturday during a run through at a local club.  He is a delight to work with and I look forward to a long and successful career for us as a team!

Love the attention...

Panel jump to start and off to the chute...

 

 

After the chute, dog walk and a jump it's the table.

 

 

 

 

 

Table, tunnel and 12 weaves - awesome weaves by my guy!

 

The weaves were followed by a jump and the a-frame - what dog doesn't love the contacts :)

 



The lighting is bad, but you can see that I have a competent working dog next to me.  It will take us some time to learn how to work really well together, but wow have we come a long, long, long way in nine months!

We did three run throughs on Saturday.  The first one he had a cute case of the zoomies and I must admit I was strutting my stuff when we left the ring to hear people say things like "he sure was proud of himself!" and "he was really having a good time!!!"  Oh my, if they knew where we began they would have had the same tears as I - he has become confident in my leadership to let me lead him up a set of stairs, into an unknown building with three very loud fans blowing and dogs barking...  Confident enough that he let himself go and had a crazy case of the zoomies during our first run - tunnel, table, tunnel, table, tunnel, a-frame, tunnel, table.. and on it went for a minute or two.  What a dream moment, that is the run I wish I had on video :)

Three Weeks to Trial

The morning sky over the agility field at The Canine Ranch

It was a gray morning in Waleska at 7:50 when we arrived for our hour of agility field rental.  The dew was heavy enough to soak through my shoes into my socks before I could get from the car to the field.  Thankfully the hard pack sand mixture on the field provides good footing for dog and handler, so we both are able to navigate the obstacles safely.

He has come so far since my good friend and trainer, Joan Meyer asked me if he'd be ready for the Triune trial (Labor Day weekend) back in March or April.  I decided to sign up for a class to see if he'd like it.  And so it began.  I can't believe we have only been training since April and here we are three weeks away from our first trial.

I took this little clip yesterday evening when I began focusing on driving him into the weaves after a series of three jumps.  It was fun to teach him to gather himself and accurately find the entrance to the poles.  He is a pretty jumper and he gains ground in accuracy every time we work. 

 



Today when I introduced the tire jump to him he picked it up pretty quickly, until I included it in a sequence of jump, jump, tire.  All of a sudden he lost it, obstacle fail.  I haven't figured it out just yet, but I think it is his association of the obstacle to the activity.  Up until today, the act of jumping is typically associated with something that has bars across it.  I think the tire jump just looked so different to him, that he didn't pick up the jumping through it action.  Somehow, I'll  have to figure out what I need to do with this problem by the time we get back out to the field next Sunday. The solution will come, it's a small train the trainer issue. 

 

I am challenged in working with him in all venues (herding, obedience and agility) by the way my brain works.  I am a thinker, often times I'm an over thinker.  When my mind begins to race to contemplate a problem that we just encountered, or a handling issue or learning curve point for me, he loses focus and begins to offer whatever is handy that he is pretty certain would be right, regardless of whatever may be going on in my brain.  At once such moment today, he trotted off to the dog walk and struck a pose while he waited for me to get it together.  I couldn't resist the photo opportunity.

 

Voluntary dog walk while he waits for me to figure out a handling problem

  

I wanted to work poles with him, but they had twelve setup and I had wandered over to see if they could easily be separated into six .  Again, I was taking too much time to think when he walked up behind me, entered the poles and gave me twelve.  He missed a couple toward the middle, but his entrance and exit were really nice.  Of course I wanted to know if that was a fluke or not, so I setup a sequence and sent him to the poles and to my delight he gave me twelve without missing any.  So, I moved my sequence around so he came the other direction to the poles and he nailed them again, not once but twice more. 

 

It is fun to be at this place where you run into a snag, look at each other and figure out how to make it work.  Love my boy!

 

Trial and Error

 

Thinking things over...

We have been together for nine months next week and we still are figuring each other out.  On most days things work well and I am left with a sense of accomplishment and even pride when the day is finished.  We really have come a long way, both of us, and I must never be tempted to forget how fragile we were in the beginning.

Wednesday nights are obedience class.  I love obedience and he loves it more.  He is honest and hard working, yet patient enough to ignore my novice obedience training errors.  I like being prepared for class, so Tuesday evenings are almost always "refresher" nights of the skills that we have worked on that week.  Tonight I decided to wrap up some training we've been doing on fronts, finishes and halts mixed with some heeling and a few signals.  It was awesome.  He was good, really good and I was learning how to communicate with him to achieve a straight finish and halt without luring him with bait.  I was pumped when we were finished.

Next up was agility.  We're three weeks from our first competition and I am hoping to be at the point that I can zone in on a few weak spots while working our strengths to finish the final preparations.   To my dismay, he was all over me tonight, there was no focus on the obstacles.  I couldn't get him to leave me alone and look forward.  Well of course not, I had just spent a tremendous effort in reinforcing his "attention" to me during our preceding obedience training.  He was just applying what he'd already been rewarded for to the task at hand.  My self talk was going something like this "all I want is a NA, NAJ title in AKC toward the versatility title...that's all I need and I'm done with agility..."  Yikes, that was the talk of someone who was ready to put a dog away and not work them in the sport anymore.  Not my typical response to challenge.

When I finally finished a successful sequence with a little drive, I ended the session with a jackpot for him.  It didn't take but two minutes of complaining to Dave to realize that I'd followed an intensive handler focused activity with an obstacle focused activity.  For Stetson, a pattern of only a few minutes or sequences quickly becomes "etched in stone" behavior.  My initial take away from this was very  short sighted - I have competition in three weeks, therefore, I'm going to deal with the situation by arranging my training around the issue.  In other words, I'll work obstacle focus skills before handler focus skills until after our first trial.  Something tells me I'll not be able to lay down to the challenge.  I'm betting on myself that I'll have figured out a way to work through this in the next week, but for tonight, I'm planning on giving myself a break on this one. When the day does come that I decide to step up to the challenge, we will both be better competitors for it.