Bar Knocking, Weaves, and Oldness

SUMMARY: Boost training update, Tika aging update.

In class last night, on the first exercise, which I wasn't sure I could get through, Boost and I did great. Except that she knocked 2 bars.

Our instructor complimented Boost's run and said that she's ready to help me go back to working on bar knocking any time I'm ready. I said, OK.

We started on this a couple of times in the past and then decided that getting Boost to actually do obstacles was the bigger issue. This issue hasn't gone away, but she *does* look really nice in class a lot of the time these days. Did it take her turning 7 to start getting the idea of what's going on?

So the first step is that I need to stop her (in training or class) as soon as she ticks or knocks a bar. This is harder than it sounds--I'm so busy trying to figure out whether I can actually do the body work for a serpentine-to-rear-cross that the fact that she's ticked a bar is invisible to me. Or so busy trying my darnedest to get 3 obstacles ahead so I can do a deceleration for a threadle that the fact that she's knocked a bar is not high on my radar. But I think I was doing better by the end of class.

I also need to count--all the bars that she attempts, and all the bars that she ticks or knocks. That was hard just in class! If we stopped partway through an exercise, and restarted some other part of the way through, repeat 3 or 4 times, jeez, how many bars did we actually attempt?

I have not been doing tons of agility work at home.

About the only things I've been practicing with either dog are table-downs with Tika and weave entries with Boost, who appears to have decided recently that a weave entry, instead of being an entry with the first pole to her left shoulder, is one of:
* Enter between the first two poles, but starting from whtever direction she's coming.
* Enter between the second and third pole, starting from whatever direction she's coming.

It's insane. We've been working on weaves for almost 7 years and she's still not figured out the real rules. Or, at least, she gets it for a while, then somehow decides that that's not what it is after all.

Anyhoo--we've been practicing weave entries.

Homework from class this week is assorted moves-to-rear cross: threadle to rear, serpentine to rear, front to rear. After all these years of agility, I am still not coordinated!

Tika, meanwhile, I swear is still getting deafer. Yesterday in the quiet kitchen, she was lying facing away from me, and I had to say her name 3 times, louder each time, before she turned her head to look at me, but in a "did I hear something?" fashion rather than "my name is being called in the kitchen! yay!" which would be normal.

Her energy level does seem lower lately. She still runs after her ball full-tilt, but might chase it only 2 or 3 times before rushing into the shrubberies to continue excavation on her tunnel to China. She doesn't bother getting up off her bed often now when I'm doing something with Boost.

We're planning on hiking several miles this weekend, and none of us have done much hiking or walking lately, just too busy & distracted. Hope things go well for all of us on the trail.

Is it A Cute Angle? Am I Obtuse? Test My Reflexes!

SUMMARY: Practicing 270-degree turns.

So yesterday, using my new coneage, I set up what claimed to be a 270-degree-angle jumping drill from the very Clean Run "Backyard Dogs" article that I showed yesterday.

It claims to be an exercise in 270-degree turns. But it is lies, lies, lies! Basically the set-up is 6 jumps arranged in a sexagram (that's the technical name for a 6-sided figure if you don't care for actual vocabularial accuracy). This means that, if you go around the outside from one jump to its adjacent jump, you are in fact DOING ONLY 240 DEGREES! Let's be honest, here! Accuracy is important! Indeed, had the article claimed to be doing reflex angles, then my dogs would have performed much better, because they would have known that the turns would be greater than 180 degrees but not necessarily exactly 270 degrees.

But instead, when I told my dogs that we were going to practice 270s, boy, did they get confused and end up all over the place, on the wrong jumps, coming inside the ring instead of staying outside, all sorts of errors like that, and all because they thought they were doing 270 angles instead of 240s!

Before you confuse your dogs like I confused mine, brush up on your angleish vocabulary.

Tomorrow, we will discuss some other irrelevant reason why I'm not able to successfully get my dogs through a course containing reflex angles in my very own back yard, let alone at a trial. (I guess it's a good thing that I'm trying to actually practice some actual agility moves. I must say that Boost did some beautiful jumps at very sharp angles of approach, which is something she's had trouble with in the ring. I just need to do a million more of those so that she's comfortable with them when she's very excited.)