a Taj MuttHall Dog Diary: Weekend Videos

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Weekend Videos

SUMMARY: Successes and near-successes

A few videos from this weekend. Didn't get most of our runs, including (sigh) Tika's lovely Jumpers, but by putting the camera where I'd have to trip over it to get my next dog out, I managed to remember it maybe half the time.

Here are some runs. I feel like I'm out there zipping lightly around the course, but here it looks like I'm lumbering like someone whose knees are sore, and it looks like I'm running on my heels instead of digging in with my toes. More to work on... plus the pounds I've put on since Nationals really show. I hate winter! (Doesn't help that I'm wearing, what, 5 layers of clothing?)

Tika's Master Standard on Sunday was lovely. Her contacts were very fast, including the dogwalk, and she kept all her bars up. But she decided to come off the table a second too early, for a disqualifying 5 faults. So sad; subtracting the time she wasted, her course time would've been up in the placements (among twenty 26" dogs):


Boost on the same course was fast, but we're just not communicating, as you'll see multiple times here, once resulting in a knocked bar, which was our only called fault on that run:


Tika's Sunday Gamble was lovely, except that she was fast enough that I ran out of obstacles to do and, not thinking well on my feet, ran right past a perfectly available teeter, which would have given Tika 1st place instead of 3rd (among 21 dogs). But her gamble was lovely (it's jump/jump/weaves/jump after the buzzer).


When Boost ran, now I knew that I could fit in two teeters, and did so. Still can see some lack of communication on where I want her to go, including blowing the gamble entry, but the opening was pretty good, with high points equivalent to the 1st-place dog:
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6 comments:

  1. Muttsandaklutz3:53 PM, February 05, 2008

    Nice videos! Great contacts and weaves by both dogs. Check out how Boost sticks that teeter in Standard! Very cool gamble by Tika; I'm jealous. :-P

    So I take it the table doesn't go extinct at the Masters level in USDAA? It does here in AAC, so many (myself included) don't spend the proper amount of time to train a really good table (look how fast both Tika and Boost lie down!), instead hoping to wing it through to Masters where we quickly proceed to forget all about it. Technically the table is allowed in Masters, but hardly any judges include it.

    PS Happy belated birthday to you and Boost :-)

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  2. Elf6:24 PM, February 05, 2008

    Thanks for the birthday wishes.

    Yup, at this point, the table is still required in USDAA Masters Standard. I keep hearing that various voices are agitating to remove it--they finally dumped it from the Grand Prix in the early 2000s--but so far it remains in Standard.

    -ellen

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  3. team small dog6:33 PM, February 05, 2008

    I was setting bars during Gamblers on Sunday (i could almost see myself out there in your video, a freezing little black blob out in the back forty) and I remembered thinking that during your run with Tika-hey do that teeter, 5 more points! That was a hard gamble-a lot of people didn't get it!

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  4. Elf6:44 PM, February 05, 2008

    That's easy for SPECTATORS to say. :-) I suck at thinking on my feet. If I plan for failures (e.g., in Snooker), then I'm OK if something goes awry. I usually try to build in extra obstacles and a couple of alternative paths in Gamblers, but Tika used them up and my brain's tape just ran out and I was left with a tabula totally dagnabbed rasa.

    -ellen

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  5. Anonymous7:45 AM, February 07, 2008

    Those looked like some nice runs from what I could see. Both Tika and Boost looked fast and the stuff that Boost did was just baby stuff. Good job!

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  6. Elf11:31 AM, February 07, 2008

    Thanks. They are both so much fun to run.

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