Foggy Night at the Agility Field

SUMMARY: Just some photos and notes.

I was going to post about Boost's training work, but instead, well, I became enchanted with the fog.

According to the newspaper's weather report, last Saturday South San Jose got .70 inches of rain and .25 more on Monday. My rain gauge says different.

In any event, everything around here is now saturated, and top that off with unseasonably warm weather this week. 

As a result, on the drive up to class last night, for the last mile I encountered clouds of fog drifting across and alongside the road, surrounding me in an odd, shifting tunnel of gray. When I alit from MUTT MVR, I admired the softly glowing agility field:

Kinetic the Papillon ponders her first agility lesson and carefully checks out all the dogs. Kinetic hikes with us regularly, many long miles without having to be carried even once.

The Merle Girls would like there to be some kind of action, here.

Our instructor shows us how it's done. At least, we think that's Ace and his handler out in the fog.

Boost's full sister (but not littermate) TCam also shows us how it's done, as the fog tries to take the field.

They can both really hustle!

And here, for your enjoyment, is the current #1 Mixed Breed AKC (I never dreamed I'd ever be saying that phrase!) agility dog, Roo. Is she good-looking or WHAT?

"Can haz photo?" ---or--- "Use the Force, Luka!"

But one of the best parts of the evening was The Owl's Song: From a Great Horned Owl, high in a dark tree, and I ran my video--you can admire the drifting fog, but then just listen--the perfect sound for a night like this:

On the way home, the fog had thickened enough that I drove that first mile--which I've driven hundreds of times at 40 MPH--at around 20, and at times on that curvy foggy road, 20 was a bit much as the road vanished and it wasn't entirely obvious whether it was vanishing into the fog or over the side of the mountain. Glad the fog cleared away as I descended the hill.

Why Discouraged?

SUMMARY: Thinking about Tika's weekends and gnawing on statistics.

I keep thinking, well, Tika did Q 40% (4 of 10 Qable runs) this last weekend, and really, that's nothing terrible. But why does it feel so terrible? I mean, other than all the stupid things that kept us from Qing?

It's because it's feeling like a trend, and I don't like the way the trend is going.

For the 13 months from Sept 2010 to Sept 2011, covering 14 USDAA trials and 170 Qable runs, Tika's average Q rate was 71%. That includes two Regionals, a year apart. And she always brought home multiple placement ribbons. Not always first, but, f'rinstance, at this most recent Labor Day Regional, out of 16 runs against 14 to 18 other dogs, we came home with four 2nds, four 3rds, and four 4ths.

Since then, things seem to be going downhill.

The late-september trial, 55% Qs.
The October trial, 40% Qs.
The November trial, 27% Qs.
December, 44%.
January, 40%. And no placements. Not one. Against half a dozen dogs.

Her Top-Ten point average per day for that 13-month period was 7.3. (Or--oh, wait--it might be higher than that because I didn't count Team top 10s. Huh.) Our average in the 5 trials since that period has dropped to 4.7 per day. Then, this last weekend--nothing. Zilch.

I've known that I've been lucky with Tika. I've known that she's getting older. But has she really gone past her peak and is plummeting that rapidly? Or am I just slacking off?

I think it's good that we've got a bunch of CPE trials coming up--they'll give me another benchmark for how she's doing compared to her average rate in that venue.

Tomorrow, on to more cheery stuff--training with Boost.

Agility Trial Colors: Purple

SUMMARY: Wordless Wednesday

Judgement Day Is Coming

SUMMARY: My first date.

Looks like I'll probably be judging one day at a UKI trial in August. Designing courses and everything. So those 4 days of judging clinic won't entirely go to waste, although I'm sure USDAA hoped I'd judge USDAA events. Maybe I'll do that eventually, too. This was offered to me, it's fairly local, it's only one day, and what the heck.

Have been reading through the rulebook. Probably will want to do that again right before the trial.

Meanwhile I can practice calling out snooker numbers. One! Seven! One! Seven! Tweeeeeet! Like that. I'm very familiar with the tweeeeeeet part.

And In Conclusion

SUMMARY: Weekend's attempt at attitude realignment.

Well, I tried, I really did.

For the most part, I succeeded at keeping the perspective that I enumerated on Friday before leaving.

I fought with the discouraged feelings and often won, but by the last class of the day, when Tika ran past yet another tunnel in Jumpers and Boost got called on a runout where it wasn't anything she did but the runout line was just annoyingly tight, I just lost it again. (I saw several people actually stop their dogs after the preceding jump before continuing to that one in an attempt to not miss the runout line.)  I ran Boost off the course at that point--she had done her obstacles well and I didn't want to ruin it after that with my frustration.

So, on the down side with Tika: She Qed only 4 of 10 classes and placed in nothing (except round 1 of Steeplechase, where she was 2nd, but that just seeds us for round 2). As last year's #1 Jumpers dog and #2 gamblers dog, we failed in both of the Jumpers and both of the Gamblers this weekend. Tika is doing odd things again; running by tunnel openings that are right in front of her is so Boost, but it is not and never was so Tika, and if it's a vision thing, I'm not yet tuned into when that's a problem, and if it's a handling thing, i don't know why that's changed. Her Standard on Saturday was slow in general and very slow on the contacts and really really determinedly not going down on the table slow--we Qed but were only a second or so under course time, which is also so not Tika. She isn't wanting to play tug before runs so much. She's not grabbing my feet after every run, which until VERY recently was a standard thing that she did from excitement and energy. She knocked several bars this weekend, so this seems to be getting worse.

On the down side with Boost, she Qed only 2 of 10 and once again got no Jumpers and no Snooker Super-Qs. That's just almost too painful for me to bear at times.

On the down side with the handler (that would be me), I made mistake after mistake after mistake. Not forgetting-the-course kinds of mistakes, but so often just moving a little too soon or a little too late, the kinds of things that (at least for me) are really hard to fix, or I'd have fixed them before in my 16 years of agility.

I was so discouraged as the weekend went on that I stopped taking notes (and people around here know of me as a prodigious and detailed note-taker) and never collected my very few ribbons. That's two trials in a row. Sigh.

So now I try to remind myself of the weekend's ups.

With Tika, mostly she ran happily and fairly fast. I am glad that a dog who will be 11 in 3 weeks is doing this well. Of the 205 dogs entered this weekend, only 17 were at least 10 years old and only 11 were at least 11 years old, so she's held up pretty darned well. She continues to amaze me with how well she responds to  all kinds of handling situations--rear crosses, really really awfully late front crosses, distance work, sharp angles, whatever.

With Boost, oh my, we had SO many nice sequences. Like:

• Saturday's Jumpers, the first 13 obstacles were spot on perfect, and the last 6 also (in the middle is where I moved just a fraction of a second too soon and pulled her off a tunnel entrance for a refusal). 
• Her Round 1 Steeplechase was gorgeous (except where she missed the weave entry, but it was quick and I was right there and we qualified for round 2, only the 4th time that she's ever done so). 
• Her Round 2 Steeplechase wasn't entirely perfect but very close to it, and she ended in 5th place to bring $ home, only the 2nd time ever that she's done so).
• Her Standard on Sunday was spot on perfect. I held her on all her contacts, as I'm not going for Top Ten points and have no reason to blow them off, so she didn't place, but she missed placing by only a second or so out of all those 22" dogs. Someone commented about her table, "She was almost lying down before she even hit the table." And she stayed down (unlike Saturday, where the butt went up and wouldn't go down again). It was really gorgeous. I might have to buy that video.
• Runouts and refusals were extremely rare, or caused by a blatant handler issue (or in today's dang jumpers, the dang tight runout line). So I guess the running in circles in the back yard is helping.
• She didn't knock nearly as many bars as usual. No bars in yesterday's jumpers, no bars in the half of today's jumpers that we ran. No bars in snooker, only one bar in today's gamblers opening and none in yesterday gamblers.  No bars in steeplechase round 1. Since I stopped taking notes, I don't remember for sure, but for whatever reason the bars  stayed up more than usual.
• Her weaves were wonderful: Other than the one miss in Steeplechase round 1,  she made all her entrances, she did them really fast, and she stayed in even when I moved away quite a distance laterally.
• I think she left a couple of contacts marginally early, but mostly she hit the ends correctly and stayed there even when I ran ahead to get into some useful position.

And the people, as always, are so wonderful. Everyone has their times of feeling discouraged or upset about something, but that's human nature. For the most part, people are helpful, cheerful, engaged, funny, forgiving, encouraging, and on your side all the way.

And then there's this, among all the pouring rain going on outside most of the weekend, with a sudden beam of sunlight touching the far sky and the folks walking a course inside the arena, who a moment before had all been in the rain-cloud darkness:

Agility Up The Wazoo

SUMMARY: And comin' out the ears.

Well, boys and girls, friends and family, I'm heading out for a weekend of USDAA agility in Santa Rosa. First trial in 6 weeks.

I will try to be:

• Upbeat
• Positive
• Forgiving to myself and my dogs (I'm pretty much always forgiving to other people already)
• Enthusiastic
• Silent about my failures
• Quietly cheerful about my successes

Next weekend I have off, and then--oh, then, gentle readers--I plunge into a planned insanity of agility, six of the next following seven weekends doing agiliy trials, with five of those six being CPE.  If I don't come out of that agility frenzy with Boost's C-ATCH, I will be greatly surprised (and dismayed).

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

They had been forecasting a huge storm starting Wednesday evening this week (it started more like late Thursday afternoon around here), with huge red warnings on the weather sites like "1.5 inches of rain expected!" So far, in my yard: barely measureable. And, except for the wind and occasional showers, it looks like the storm is a fizzle.

So, happy happy to go off to the arena (under cover) and still be able to get some frisbee in out on the lawn ("in out on", how's that for a phrase?).

Hope you all have a lovely weekend while I'm out there trying to remember to be a better person.

A Little Memory Trip

SUMMARY: In the dawn of agility

In this post, I mentioned that I started training at Power Paws Agility before they became Power Paws. I couldn't for the life of me remember what Nancy's training name was; I knew that it was something to do with being up in the air on the side of a mountain range-- Highcroft Dog Training? Hillside Dog Training?

Digging through my dusty mental attic for 16-year-old information wasn't working, so I had to ask. And Lo! Nancy actually scanned for me the one piece of paper that she still has from back then:

How cool is that?

What's even more cool is that she's the one who drew all those amazingly cute little dogs. Reminds me again how multitalented and artistic so many agility folks are. We've got people making jewelery, painting, creating 3D critters, knitting, sketching, photographing... fun to see it all.

(BTW, later, when I asked a car full of people what Power Paws was before Power Paws, in unison they came up with "Foothill Dog Training." The Collective Consciousness wins again.)