Training for the Weekend

SUMMARY: Serps, bars, USDAA this weekend.

Yes, boys and girls, we have a USDAA trial this weekend out in Turlock. And, since I've been concentrating on other important things in the meantime [um--facebook?--]*, and Boost turned 5 two weeks ago and Tika turns 8 this weekend, I figure it's time to finally spend some time fixing ALL OUR AGILITY ISSUES before the trial this weekend.

In class this week, Tika did our jumpers courses just absolutely beautifully and looked completely healthy. I'm sure that, had we done contacts, they'd have been perfect as always (they were last week).

It was Serpentine night, and Boost and I demonstrated once again that this is a major chink in our armour: Boost wouldn't come in, or knocked the bar when she did, or in one memorable escapade, took me out at the knees so that my denim-blue-colored fleece became stylishly mottled with mud-colored mud. Both with serps and with blasting through a tunnel, if I'm yelling to get her to come in my direction, she keeps going in her original trajectory full speed while LOOKING at me, and then after evaluating that I'm not moving, makes a huge ugly L-shaped turn to come in to me.

She also [gasp!] knocked bars in several places.

Tika and Boost do some warm-up drills.

So yesterday I actually set up some serp thingies with jumps and tunnels in my yard. Tika did them flawlessly (when my timing was good, anyway, and even sometimes when it was iffy). Boost had a terrible time.

So we backed off to just our customized bar-knocking drills, and after doing about 40 just-one-jump drills when she got to where she wasn't even ticking the bar any more, we went back to the serp drill and broke it down into pieces until she could finally do two at-speed single-jump serps without knocking the bar, and we quit that for the day.

Tika loves her bed. It's the best toy in the universe for playing "Keeeel eeet!" with in the morning. To loosen up for agility, of course. (You like the sign in the background for this?)

Also working on contacts with both dogs. I have suffered for my sins, oh Dogfather! I relaxed my nose-touch criteria and both dogs' contacts have deteriorated. So we went back to remedial nose touches to a target, then standing at the end of the ramp doing target nose touches, then partway down the ramp and running to targeted nose touches, until I ran out of special treats and we left that for the day, too.

I hope I can get more of all of that in today, among packing, going for a nice brisk hike with a friend, and work, and--um--facebook.*

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*OK, some facebook, but really photography and work and random random random things, but saying "facebook" is funnier. I think.

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