The good news is that Scoop was in his second full AKC trial this past weekend and finished his novice standard title and is now in both Open JWW and Standard. The bad news is that we have not trained all the skills that he is going to encounter in open and excellent. The big ones we are missing are discrimination with contacts/tunnels and different side changes at the A-frame, as well as a bit more independence on the weave exits.

Scoop got his first open jumpers leg, here is the video.  You will see a bit of a bobble when I momentarily lost my way, and almost skipped an obstacle. Scoop did not seem to care, I resent him to the jump and he scooted off nicely and I got back on track. duh:) And we did most of the open standard before the wheels fell off. We got through  obstacle 12 smoothly which included a tunnel to DW challenge (by sheer luck since I have never asked him to turn out of a tunnel and go back up a contact). He had a nice DW and good weave entry, lovely table and THEN we had a really most spectacular teeter flyoff. One of those catch your breath in your throat and hope the dog comes down out of the air at some point without any broken bones.

And a skill I really discovered I was missing was what to do on course after an error without a toy to toss or play tug with. Scoop got a bit overstimulated when I had to reset him after a bobble and he considered using me as a tug toy. He stayed at my side when we went to re-enter a set of weaves he had popped at pole 10 when I tried to fade laterally, the problem was how close he was at my side. He was close enough for me to feel his breath on my leg but luckily a word of warning kept him from stepping over the edge.

This week we have discrimination on our list of training goals, along with practicing heelwork in the middle of a course without any toy reinforcer in my hand, and continuing Scoop’s frame training with more side changes before and after. And of course, Letter K and hopefully one or two more letters if there is time.

I hope you have a long list of training goals this week with your novice dog too. Life would be so boring if everything was perfect and we didn’t have a training goal for the week/month & year.

NJG

Letter J

I trained Scoop on Letter J skills over the past two days, and I think I will leave the setup in place for at least another training session or two. Scoop did much better than I expected. I haven’t done bounce work of any sort since he was much younger, and J drills have diagonal and bend work while bouncing. He seemed balanced when we started yesterday, but I realized at the end of todays’ session that he looked even better. This tells me that he improved on the skills and maybe he can improve even more.  Here is letter J.

I started working each end of the J, first the diagonal lines, photo of Scoop bouncing the diagonal below. I worked both sides going both directions two times each side. A total of 8 passes.

Then we did the bounce circles, and did approximately 8 of those. Photos:

Then I added first the middle jump to the bend work, then turned around and added the middle jump before the diagonal line. Then I went right into the diagonal to the middle jump to the bendwork, and turned around and went the opposite direction. Each pass I rear crossed either into the bend or the diagonal line.

I just want him to look comfortable and smooth when bounce jumping, no effort, no added strides, and on the bounce circles I want to see him bending around the arc. When I put the full drill together he bounced through the diagonal, lengthened on the straightaway, then tucked right into the bounce arc and followed my rear cross cue. He never added steps, looked much different from one side to the other, or even knocked a bar. All that tells me he is comfortable with the challenge. I really like this drill. I got ideas for the setup some years ago from training sessions with Susan Salo.

Here in California we are totally blessed with perfect weather this week. It was 70 degrees yesterday! I can’t wait to get out and play today, in fact I have the whole weekend at home to do whatever I want, and what I want is more J, then maybe K….:)

NJG

Scoop and I had a great time at the Portland AKC trial. I have been to that show almost every year since 1996, and this was one of the best ever. It is indoors on good matting, the same as the AKC Nationals. The courses were fun, the Time to Beat demo on Saturday night was perfect, allowing the handlers to run as often as they liked for $5. a run for charity. Some of the 2010 World Team Members (and coach:)) were at the event and we offered to run other handlers dog for a further $20. donation to the World Team. Those dogs that were willing to go round the ring with us had a great time as did we!

The weekend ended with ISC jumpers which I obviously do not enter with my dogs because as the World Team Coach I believe it would be inappropriate. However fate stepped in this year. My 7 year old BC Ace tied with a team for first in Excellent JWW and the course was torn down before we could have a run off. The ISC jumpers was offered as an alternative for the runoff and we gladly accepted. We ran at our 20 inch height at the end of the class, and thankfully had a fast and clean run on the challenging ISC course as the very last run of the entire show weekend. The grandstands cheered, and Ace and I had a blast.

Scoop was a pretty good boy. We made our debut in Novice standard and got 2 out of 4 legs. The wheel sort of fell off the last two standard runs. A ticked broad jump, refusal on the teeter, a tunnel off course when I was trying to reset to take the teeter, and a couple more bumbles in there as well.  We did get our third Novice JWW leg and got to move to Open JWW the last day. We had a pretty nice run but pulled a bar. You can watch our run here.

It took Scoop a couple runs to get used to the mats and the indoor trial setting as he has never trained in that environment. My bad, I should have made some trips to work in that kind of setting, but we got lucky anyway and he adjusted to the different footing just fine. He didn’t show as much speed or turning ability as he does on grass, and he added some extra strides I wish he would have left out, but fine for his first experience on mats. The first two days they held the FAST class as well and we qualified both times. So the weekend results were fairly nice for my green green boy. 2 Fast legs, 2 standard legs and a finished title in jumpers over the 4 day event.

Today is a training day. Scoop’s 2o2o behavior on the DW and teeter were pretty funky at the event. He stopped short on both contacts and reached back between his legs and nose touched the board. Two things going on there. First, I think the surface change from wood to rubber was something he thought was odd and he just doesn’t have any reinforcement history on that surface change. And maybe a bigger reason is that last week when running the contacts he was stopping with his feet barely off the board in 2o2o, and when he reached between his legs to nose touch, his nose came back almost to the board and I inadvertently marked that exaggerated behavior. Whoops!!

I am going to do a refresher course this week on 2o2o to remind him how far off the board his feet should be and that he needs to touch straight to the ground not reach back for the board. We already had one session this morning and it went well, but I have the plexi target out and we are just working on proofing on a flat board. I need to get the target away again, and proof on lots of different surfaces. This morning we worked wood to cement. I will drag out a long rubber mat to work on later, and I am going to skip wood to grass training for a couple days.

I am thinking about which alphabet drill to work on today….maybe letter “J”.

Thank you Mia for sending the nice photos of Jerry Ross from Santa Barbara a couple weeks ago. Can one ever have enough dog photos? Nah!

If you got to run your baby dog at a show on the weekend I hope you had as much fun as I did and that your dog did perfect start lines like Scoop did, and played every time you asked as well. If you accomplished that then the weekend was a successful one.

NJG

This evening I put up the letter V drill. Easy setup of only 3 jumps. Scoop is really just now learning to decelerate and turn well and the ping pong drills and multiple front crosses gave me places to reward all the turns and then open the drill back up again and run around the 270 pattern. Which letter will we do tomorrow…. we leave for a show tomorrow so maybe something with lots of variation…I will sleep on it:)

Here are just a few of the cool V drills. Enjoy NJG

While I was working on proofing the pages for the Alphabet Book, I realized that there are so many of the letters that I still need to train with Scoop. I have decided to systematically go through each one of the original Alphabet drills over the next month, starting with some of the most fundamental exercises and progressng to the more difficult patterns and drills. Yesterday we started with the letter O. I love this simple setup.  Here’s a couple of the drills I did with front crosses at the side change.

NJG