Breeze and I were at a point where I need to learn some more distance work and where I need to put myself so I can give her good information and have things flow. I still have trouble backing off and letting her handle things she is capable of handling-letting her work further out and trusting she knows what she is doing. She has gotten more confident if I give her good directions and a lot faster - my handling has needed to change to accommodate that ;-), so I really felt like I wanted to work on that and the weaves before I stuck her in more trials.
Sooooo...tonight we scraped off some of the rust and took a private with Deanna. Deanna is wonderful, she is always cheerie no matter what is going on in her life, she always acts like you and your contact problem or your off course dilemma's are of the up most importance, she always makes sure you understand and she always is just so encouraging, I love training with her. My training buddy Denise-who runs with a gorgeous rough coated collie named Kodi, and I got to work on a nice little course.
IT FELT GOOD TO BE BACK, and especially training with Deanna, no pressure, no worrying about anything else just immerse yourself in agility for an hour. What could be better?
I wanted to work on treadles, somewhere in our training we had never learned how to handle those-so I had a lot of clever ways to get around them, but that was one of the goals for this private for me. I know how I handled them with Chloe who was a very different dog and that was not going to work with Breeze and I wanted to make sure I could handle them from behind-where I will no doubt be.... I also wanted to make sure it worked in my handling system. So on my video that is the one place I was still having trouble getting my timing at first was the treadles, that was our first attempt. After the video we worked on them and by george a little more practice on the timing and I think we will have it. My other problem area has been the weaves and I could not figure out what was going on there. We broke it down during this lesson and it appears I neglected to work them with a lot of pressure from me being by the weaves. Breeze can handle them if I am far away, or if I stand fairly still but when I am really running it blows her mind. So we got some exercises to practice for that. A very productive lesson.
Here is the course we worked on, I am sure I got some of the spacing way off, but it did have a lot of weird angles when I walked it, things did not line up so it was a little more of a challenge.
DENISE AND KODI's RUN
BREEZE and ME
contacts
We also kicked around the contact dilema and since I just do not seem to be able to get a 2020, but Breeze is definitely striding through the yellow and doing ok on that, I am going to continue to train a 2020 in practice, have her hop on and off and keep having her find that spot rewarding but I am going to just go ahead and live with the 4 on the floor. Sometimes you have to pick your battles, and how much of my life do I want to devote to this contact? We have also had Breeze going back to really being crooked on her down, but it is working and I am not going to sweat that. Now the table and the start line, since I am going with what I have in the contacts....I am going to be dealing with those a lot more, LOL.
5 comments:
I'm so glad you had a private lesson and got to spend an hour devoted to agility!! The threadles in that course look tough! Good skill to work on!
That course had some tricky stuff. Glad you were able to "go back to school", I think it is a good stress reliever, from the day to day stuff.
Breeze looked liked she was having a blast.
That looked like a tough little course. On that threadle, I probably would use that same left arm to bring her in and then continue with it to push her back out over the next jump. I wouldnt switch arms, thats usually a turning cue. ( this is just my opinion). I think you should leave the four on the floor if its working and she likes it. She looked really good. Diana
What an awesome practice! Threadles are tough.. I'm still trying to work through them myself. It's funny because I'm so much better at handling them in my backyard - I wonder if I get stressy at class like some dogs do!
It's great to see you back out there again. Totally envious of your tunnel sends.. I have to practically shove Marge in the tunnel lately..
We talked about how to handle a treadle but in my own handling system with Breeze it would be a conflicting signal using one arm to what I have already taught her, if I would have used one arm with Breeze, but that second arm means collect and start coming back to me, it is just my timing sucked because I have not used that type of handling threadles before, ;-). We sort of talked about that a lot last night.
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