Catching up

Since I last posted, we have attended the first ever IncrediPAWS winter camp, and Revel participated in a USDAA match! Now we're resting up a bit before our two scheduled trials in January.

Camp was great. We worked a half day with each of four instructors: Linda Mecklenburg, Mary Ellen Barry, Jenn Crank and Karen Holik. My group started with Linda. It's been a while since I've worked with her. I love working with Linda! I love focusing on small things that improve my handling and my understanding of how to cue effectively. We worked through some exercises similar to the ones in her recent Clean Run article on double fronts and blended fronts.

Each instructor had an emphasis for her sequences, and we worked through and built upon several skills. We did some challenging things that I would like to set up and practice, and some challenging things that we nailed! Honestly, I was reminded of why I used to like training so much more than trialing. I love digging in, being picky, and trying things several times to improve the overall performance. With trialing, you get one shot with a single run, and it's over very quickly. It's a rush, definitely, but I love the actual work/training sessions more. I also love learning by watching others run dogs of all speeds and sizes. Although I was tired at the end of the day, especially on day 2, I didn't feel like my head was going to explode....which means I have internalized a great deal of the material already. This is great for me, and demonstrates that I'm making progress in my understanding and performance in the sport.

The very next weekend after camp, I took Revel south two hours to a friend's place for a USDAA match. It was my motivation to get him registered in USDAA and to get him out to experience agility in more locations. I was very pleased with him. His first run, Standard, was goofy. He wasn't very obstacle-focused; he missed the weaves the first time, didn't stop on the DW, and flew off the teeter. He wasn't too sure of some of the jumps, either. Gamblers was next, and since there were no course changes, I elected to skip playing the game and just run him through the Standard course again. Wow, what a difference! He was amazingly improved the second time through! From then on, he was much better, actually looking for obstacles and understanding lines. Our turns on the flat (especially the RC) still need a lot of work, but that will come. He had no trouble at all jumping 26" and actually looked like he knew what he was doing after that first run (we had four runs total).