Sunday, July 17, 2011

Agility trumps swimming-where is the value?

Guess Cricket likes playing agility ;-)!

A funny thing happened today....Cricket LOVES swimming sooo much. She will swim off and avoid having to get out and will swim FOREVER! Today she was swimming when I took Lizzie out of the pool. As I was walking with Liz through the agility yard I let Liz do a little agility because she has not done much agility in awhile.

Well, my little fish Cricket quickly decided that swimming as much as she loves it has to take a back seat to agility, esp if her sister is doing it with her mom. Everyone knows she is the agility dog right now and it is her equipment. All of a sudden Cricket was going nuts trying to get out of the pool to her equipment. It made me feel good that obviously doing agility has some value for her!

MY WEAVE CHALLENGE:

This time I wanted to work with 12 poles, HOWEVER, it is a lot of weaving and I do not want to put her body through too much, so in the Sylvia Trkman Foundation Agility class she has us open the channels to practice entries without putting a lot of strain on the dogs body, so here I opened a narrow "channel" so the first few poles Cricket has to dig in and start weaving but then it is a little easier on her for the last poles, but she still is practicing staying until the last pole.

Another thing that Sylvia Trkman had us do is turn our shoulders in, move the opposite way, do weird things so the dog "gets" they need to complete the poles no matter what we do once they get in.

I am ALMOST through the challenge, just jump position 8 and 9 to go.
Here is jump position 6.

It was really hot....so we were slower then we should have been, and I was just distracted-don't train distracted, LOL.

Cricket is now running to a toy on the ground, she understands she does the weaves then a jump before her toy and has great forward focus, which is excellent because there was a lot of curling back before-however, I suppose we will have to balance that a little so she is not just leaving the weaves and taking off without me, ;-).





WEAVE UPDATE:

Ricky posted his jump position 4 video, Ricky is just such a good boy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9q6d4AUYO8

Marie is just such an awesome team with Dare. They completed their jump position 6 and check out how well they did. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpon5GpgjnQ&feature=channel_video_title

6 comments:

Diana said...

Just awesome Kathy!! Its nice when your dog thinks agility is the greatest thing of all!!

Sara said...

Holy crap! Cricket is amazing~focus,drive, dealing withher momma doing weird stuff! It is obvious that she LOVES the game.

Steffi said...

WOW!!! Cricket's weaving is AMAZING! She didn't look slow to me. And I love how you threw in the shoulder turn and moved the opposite way - great idea, I'm going to try that. And great idea with opening up a channel.

Chris and Ricky said...

Cricket did just great with her weaving - and to think she will give up nice cool swimming for hot agility! Wow!

Anonymous said...

Cricket rocks! I was thinking that I need to start doing some change of pace, stopping midway, shoulder turns too, but I thought maybe I should wait till after I'd done the original positions. Course, maybe I'm just procrastinating, cause it makes me nervous. LOL I'm glad to have you two motivating the rest of us. Cause I know I sure need it!

Sagira said...

WOW...she is flying through those weaves. NICE JOB!