Scoop and I have been busy training contacts and weaves and still saving some training time for handling drills. I even ran a couple full courses with Scoop this past week, hard courses, international style with weaves, threadles, serps and other technical stuff. Since I don’t ever have novice courses up in the field, the only novice jumpers Scoop has ever seen was in the one and only USDAA jumpers course he did a couple months ago before I hurt my foot. He did jumpers and gamblers that first show.

Since I am back to running or at least toddling faster I figured I had better finally try the game to see if he could really do a full course. I normally do 3 to 10 obstacle drills, and it felt scary to try the whole course. I missed a couple serps in the beginning of the course, not trusting that I could run into position, not trusting that he would not knock me down if I was out of position:), and really just not knowing if we could put it all together. But we did, and it was exhiliarating and fun. Somewhere along the rocky road this year I think I might actually have trained my dog to do real agility! Of course we are a very unproven and inexperienced team and we need lots of mileage away from home.

I am entered in a few weeks in JWW and FAST at a New Years trial, that will be a big test for us, indoors and full courses, with weaves, multiple days in a row. I am remembering my first day of trialing with all of my dogs. I remember Riots’ first day I could not wait to get in the ring, and when I came out I was  begging to do it again, I just could not wait to walk into that ring with her.  (Actually I would pay a fortune to do it just one more time!) Wicked’s start in agility was not as memorable, maybe because she was not as fast, and she was also just SO obedient and easy to handle, she made it simple for me. Same with Ace. Now Panic…I remember that day. Or should I say I remember the disaster, the off courses, the inattentive dog, the one who did not show again for two months till he was better trained and a bit more grown up. Scoops’ first time in the ring was calm compared to that chaos. Now it is going to feel like the first time all over again after a three month break. Will he weave, will he stay, will he come when I call, will he be worried about the big barn and the noises and the dirt surface? Don’t know but can’t wait to find out.

I hope you are waiting to experience the excitement and exhiliaration of starting your novice dog in the ring, and I hope both our experiences live up to our lofty expectations.

NJG

Scoop and I trained serps and threadles this morning, and I convinced Jim he had 10 minutes to film me before his classes started. While I am no moviemaker yet, I do think my little efforts are getting better, and if I keep filming myself  this often, my handling may eventually improve too:)

I hope you are taking the time to videotape some of your practice sessions with your pup, I think it is one of the most valuable learning tools that we have.

NJG

Scoop and I are rusty on our handling exercises. I haven’t been able to run drills with him for the past couple months because of my foot injury and travel schedule.The injury followed 10 days of no training while I was in Germany which followed a  month of foot discomfort before the trip where I did again little running and lots of weave training. I have been doing long lead-outs after walking to my position and then adding a few more obstacles which I could send Scoop to while walking. And I did a fair amount of sending to jumps and tunnels to get into position for contact training.

So, now I want to move a bit and Scoop is driving a bit too well into the corners, and thinks it lots of fun to bounce the diagonal lines on my box work. I like that he bounces unless I don’t want the diagonal line. This week I was a bit frustrated thinking he has forgotten how to follow me around the corners on shoulder turns. Along with no running agility, there has been no fast paced circle work, just heelwork circles on both sides at a walk. I was wondering if all would be fine when I could really run my ground work drills again. In the meantime I decided to see what would happen with no bars on the jumps in my box work. I placed all the bars on the ground and just ran him through the jump standards. He followed me through all the patterns wonderfully. Front cross, rear cross, pulls through the box on shoulder turns, 270’s, threadles, it was all there.  So I put the jumps to 12 inches, that worked well too after the ground bar exercises. I was able to move him back up to 26 inches over the course of 48 hours and he looked so much better. I think we just need to train the jumping at speed again, he hasn’t really forgotten his skills, we just haven’t used them for a while.

The teeter training is coming along. I am only a few inches from regulation height most of the time, and I have done a few teeters at full height which you’ll see here on the video. A frame training is not perfect but pretty good. Scoop does the best when I throw his toy as he is coming over the top of the frame. He digs in and pushes off from the contact zone. I made a little movie of some of his training the other day. Not the most professional edit job, or the camera work but hope you enjoy nonetheless:)

Scoop and I have lots of fun every day, usually doing at least 2 or 3 short training sessions. In a few days I leave for the East Coast to teach and will be gone 9 days. I am going to miss Scoop and the rest of my pooches and my training, which once again has just started to gain momentum before it will come to another complete halt. SIGH:(

Hope you are in full swing with your training and that nothing gets in the way of your success.

NJG

Scoop and I did about a hundred low teeters this morning. After the rain started my training was limited to some heel work in the house. Ace helps. He heels on one side and Scoop on the other. In my quest to combine lots of dog training with very few human steps, I thought what better way than to do both dogs heelwork at the same time.  My new podiatrist has been consulted and I have my instructions. The doc says stay off it, and my foot yells loudly no running. The fascia is strained or sprained or pulled a little or a lot, sometimes it feels like a lot, like after teaching, and when I am sitting at my desk, it feels like little.

Back to teeters though.The latest on my training is running a lowered teeter like a flat board. Scoop has gotten his feet all tangled under the teeter a few times while playing bang games, and that made him a bit cautious.  I don’t want to play board games or do back chaining right now, so I am just letting him run the board. If he does not run straight through, I call him off the toy without playing and just start again. The next rep has always been great, so I think he is understanding the process. I am going to do a few more days or a week  of this and then build his 2o2o back in to the full height training.

The results of me spending an inordinate amount of time at my desk and entertaining myself with things other than real work or dog training is really appreciating my favorite internet stuff. These are some of the things I can’t live without on my desktop.

Pandora internet free radio, where you make your own stations. http://www.pandora.com/. My favorite station today is Jakob Dylan radio, Pandora plays his songs and other artists with similar tendencies. I can’t work without Pandora in the background and I have all my special stations I can switch to in a heartbeat depending on my mood.

Picassa, Google’s free photo organizing system that keeps all the thousands of photos and faxes and pdf’s all accessable in one place. Get it for free at picasa.google.com. I don’t know how I managed all my stuff before Picassa.

And my new favorite  software is Microsoft’s Windows Live Movie Maker, it is so easy, I finally feel like I know what I am doing with simple video editing.

Last night while browsing  hundreds of channels on the real boob tube I found LINK TV, a very great find indeed. Documentaries and other great programming like World Music which you can also get on the web at  http://www.linktv.org/.

After watching World Music on Link TV I found the Link tv website and got to listen to a great song from a Swedish band named Tummel. I am going to go into overdose on this song, so I thought I had better spread round the joy, and I found their music video on YOU TUBE of course.

After I did the Tummel search I remembered I hadn’t been to TED for a while, so I went and browesed through some great presentations and good music. I wish I had time to spend a few hours on this site every week!

http://www.ted.com/

After falling over with laughter at Ze Franks’s presentation, I went to his site and blog and I know if this foot keeps me sitting a lot this month, I will be a constant visitor.

http://www.ted.com/speakers/ze_frank.html

And while I am trying to find the blessings in sitting and taking some down time, I will share my latest read with you.  Greg Mortenson’s, Stones Into Schools, his second book about building schools for girls in Pakistan. His first one, Three Cups of Tea is one of the most important books I have ever read and I totally enjoy this second one. A perfect book for a good dose of reality and how not to feel sorry for yourself is to remember all the privileges we are accorded in the USA. Greg is the ultimate get ‘er done guy, but on a global scale and he is making more difference in creating world peace than all the politicians put together.

If you are having a break from training or at least running, I hope you’ll explore some of the places that help me run my life or at least enjoy it a bit more.

NJG

Agility training takes on a new aspect when the handler can’t run and walks at turtle speed. I haven’t seen a foot doctor yet to diagnose my inability to properly use my right foot, but suspect I have torn something at least slightly important in the business of locomotion. I was hoping I would be better after some days of icing, nsaids, and not running. I see  the local agility podiatrist on Thursday, hopefully she will give me some shortcut to recovery! I haven’t stopped training but the focus on how I am training has certainly changed.

The e-frame training is pretty easy as over the last week Scoop has gotten much more enthusiastic at being able to send independently  to a jump or tunnel 30 feet away so I can have a different e-frame approach, while walking or standing still in a perfect position to see Scoop hit the contact. In fact Scoop’s independence at sending to obstacles was getting a little TOO easy, so I am also reinforcing lots of lineups at my side and perfect stays before I send. I don’t want him to anticipate that each time he returns with the toy he is going to get to tear away from me to a distant obstacle.

I don’t really want him to anticipate anything other than that he should be waiting nicely for my directions at my side. I decided I needed to add more obstacles to send him to, so now I have a table, a couple jumps and 2 tunnels. Scoop gets rewarded for frame performance with a toy, then he returns to me to tug. I ask for the toy and line him up straightly on whichever side will facilitate a straight send to an obstacle. I walk  a step forward while sending him, so I have a little bit of forward motion on each send. If he does not line up straight on my side and wait for a release I just start over, ask again for CLOSE (line up on my left) or SIDE (line up on my right) and either release him to tug, give him a cookie, or send him out to the obstacle and on to the e-frame. This of course works for any kind of independent obstacle performance I might want to work on with a moving approach to an obstacle from another obstacle. I have also been doing a bit of teeter and weave work this way as well using the stationed obstacles. Since I want an independent performance on all my contacts and weaves, this is valuable training. However I like to mix it all up and move around as well when I am training these obstacles. Right now I can walk slowly to a new position, but I can’t get there fast.

I filmed some of Scoop’s frames yesterday, and I almost look like I was trotting, though I thought I was barely walking. I didn’t film the stays and lineups, makes for too long of a video. I have the beep turned off for the moment, and I have a stride regulator in the middle. The bump is at the edge of the contact zone, and if Scoop hits it instead of the zone, it applies pressure and he gets a beep which I don’t want. So no sound right now.

I have been playing around with placing the toy 15 to 20 feet from the bottom of the frame, or tossing a toy as Scoop comes over the top of the frame.  Today I liked the toy tossing better than stationary placement. I felt like it made him dig in and drive over the top better. The bump is on the frame in all these reps, I am going to do some more tomorrow with the bump placed on the frame randomly and the beep on the E-frame on. I only recently added the bump to the middle. When Scoop did his flatwork it was without a bump. I felt like I needed a visual aid for both of us after I put the frame to 5.6, hence the little bump.

Today I am pretty happy with where the frame training is going.  Hope you are as happy with your pups A-frame training as I am with mine.

NJG