Course of the Week

Course of the week last night was fun. Course of the week is basically a practice night that Teamworks setup. Every Wednesday night you can come and run your dogs through the course. They have 2 rings, one ring has a course to run and the other, the grass ring has agility equipment that you can use as you would like.

I am trying to determine when clover is at her best so I know how to handle her when it comes to show time. During the trial last week, I had her out on a leash long before it was time to compete and all the dogs and people seemed to get her hyped up. Last night I took her out and ran the course right away. I didn't seem to notice any difference in her attention span. On the first run last night, she was running all over from excitement. I ran her pretty hard for 2 hours and then when we ran the last run of the night she was flawless. I don't know if it was because she was tired or because she had the course memorized! She does seem to remember patterns well... a little to well sometimes...

In the practice ring we focused on 2 main areas--- Proofing contacts and weave poles. Contacts have been a continual struggle for us. In fact, when she was about 18 months, I took a trouble shooting class because she was jumping off the top of the A-frame. The class helped tremendously, but during the trial last weekend, she seemed to revert back to her skydiving self. She was lucky she got her Q. During practice though she does pretty well. She has to be reading me and knowing I want her to go faster...in otherwords... its me not her!

One change I made was rewarding her with food at the contact. Clover is a ball motivated dog and I usually don't use much food as reward. But toys excite and food calms, so I have been starting to reward her with more food at the contacts so she doens't get excited and leave early. It seems to be working, but she sure needs a lot more proofing!

Weave poles are interesting challenge. She usually does the 6 weave poles OK-- yes, just OK. She usually has to restart a couple of times because she circles, or herds, the first pole. I was worried about the weave poles during our first competition but amazingly, in almost every run, she weaved through with no problem. One quirk that I have noticed is that I have to follow along side of her bent down to prevent her from popping out. If I stand up straight she pops out--Something else have to break her of! When it comes to the 12 weave poles though, she has a chronic case of 10th weave pole popout. That is mostly what we worked on last night. I don't push her hard on weave poles because she has square shoulders and seems to tire more easily on weave poles.

Clover loves running all out, so often as a reward for working on the dreaded weavepoles and contacts, she gets to run jumpers and tunnelers. Clover responds much better to my body signals than to vocal commands so she does better at jumpers than the tunnelers. Clover loves going through tunnels, so I need to work more with vocal directions. It sure would have helped when we ran the tunnelers last weekend.

Anyway, gotta go. We are suppose to have class tonight, but Michelle, our instructor is getting over the flu and doesn't want to be out in the cold, so we are getting together to view agility tapes from Agility In Motion . I think I will rent the ring for an hour tonight though so Clover can practice and stretch.