Sore Points: 270s and Tika's Neck

SUMMARY: This week's training and Tika's sore, again.

This week in the yard I've been concentrating on 270-degree turns with various angles of approach and departure. Both dogs need more practice at it. Just not something I've concentrated on in a long time.

Wednesday evening, Tika came up sore. Yelping when doing her usual excited-about-food leaping, so didn't even want to leap for that. No practice yesterday during the day and I tried massaging her arms and neck and back. She loves that! So relaxed, eyes half shut. She'd make a good princess.

But she ran around the yard after the toy and random evil squirrels full-speed just fine and played tug-of-war, so it's getting out of the horizontal movement that's hurting. However, last night in class, wouldn't play tug of war at all. Went over a 16" practice jump just fine, and 22", but when I tried to just run her on a course at 22" (4" lower than usual), she went over the first jump and then hunched up and stopped. Crap.

So last night it was a rimadyl and today we'll just try more massage and stretching and a little bit of distance work with tunnels and maybe very low jumps, to keep her warmed up. I don't need this right before a competition weekend! Crap again.

Also for Boost have been practicing just running full-speed down a straight line of jumps. Which, in my yard, is 3 jumps about 15 feet apart, which is nothing--I can keep up with her easily, so I have to deliberately hang back and not run that fast. Which is very different from what we encounter in competition.

And that showed very well last night in class, when there were 4 jumps going all the way across the field and I was about four thousand feet behind her by the second jump and then she's veering right and left and starting to want to spin while she's ahead of me.

So in a few minutes once again we're going up to Power Paws to use their field for an hour to practice long series of jumps in a row, working with various things to have her focus on going rather than waiting.

She did have some very nice runs last night, although rear crosses are also still a bugaboo. Got more advice on working on that from World Team Coach, so there's more for today.

This weekend's pretty light for a weekend of USDAA agility. But, still, if Tika's healthy, she could earn her Silver Pairs Relay title (that's 25 Qs); Boost could earn her Standard Masters title (that's 5 Qs), and if we could get that dang jumpers leg, her MAD (requires 3 Standard legs and one of everything else).

So here I go...