Class 11/29/10

We introduced some discrimination. Annie was pretty good at this. I basically had to yell close and move forward up the dog walk and she'd come with me.

Class 11/22/10

We worked on some more distance tonight. We did some jumps to a hard left turn to tunnel. I learned the value of rotating my shoulders as well as keeping my feet moving.

Class 11/15

Had a good class tonight. We worked some distance exercises

First we did 3 jumps on an arc. Elizabeth showed us how we need to use our body to direct the dog. For example on the arc we want to turn the way we want our dog to go.

Next we did a layering exercise:


The trick to this was not running straight to the dog walk but waiting for the dog to come out of the tunnel to press forward. IF you stand at the dog walk, what does the dog see when it comes out? You standing in front of the dog walk....

Lastly we did a serpentine exercise which Annie did nicely. Elizabeth suggested to handle the serp with the rest of the course in mind ie if you want to end up on the far side, handle on that side, if you want to end up on the starting side..handle it on that side...be aware of where you'll want to end up...

Shows this past weekend...

Annie had a busy weekend being a JR handling dog,as well as competing in rally, obedience and agility.

First day: Open B Obedience: Heeling pattern was good. Got lost in the posts. Lost 15 points. Recall -stalled at about the drop. Retrieve over the jump couldn't have been any more unenthusiastic -hit jump. Broad jump: She did it caveletti style. Stays -A plus!

Rally: Novice-she did well - I had a brain fart and cost her 10 points.

Novice Gamble: The run went exactly as planned, how about that? I had timed it with a stopwatch and she ran it exactly as per my stopwatch. I was pretty pleased!

Second Day: Open B Obedience: A successful broad jump (our best yet in competition). Retrieve over jump -stopped to watch the agility ring before picking up the dumbell and returning. Pretty darned slow. Retrieve on the flat - pretty decent but finished by herself. Heeling figure 8 was first, and she looked spooked by one of the "posts". Got disconnected. HEeling pattern was about the same -she lagged about 10 feet behind and NQ'd. Drop on recall -decent (I messed up and found my hands in the air). Stays -another A plus!

Rally: We moved up to Advanced and she was utterly awesome. One crooked sit (which I fixed and cost us more) ..a 196! Yeah. We can do this!

And a first out of four with Kt in the Jrs novice class.

Class 11/08/10

We did some distance exercises tonight - a simple Tire, jump then left tunnel didn't prove to be so easy. Annie was being goofy about the tire jump running under it and then on the cue tunnel would hang a right to the dog walk. Elizabeth suggested I rotate my body more, and sure enough that got Annie going in the right direction.

Class 10/04/10

Finally we have wonderful weather for agility class! It's actually sweater time. I guess I missed posting about last weeks class. Let's see if I can remember some of it...

We did an exercise tunnel over a jump, hard left to dogwalk, out over a jump and then had to slice left to continue over the jump. The tricky part was cueing the dog early enough to get the last jump. Cue too early and they'd pull off the first jump, too late and they'd miss it.

We also worked on teeter, hard-left then tunnel. I had problems with Annie on that. It seems she wouldn't send on to the tunnel from the teeter, something to practice.

Class Tonight: We started off with a course which Annie ran decently. She sailed over her A-frame and I mean sailed. I'm going to have to train her to run out to a target as when I try to add distance to the A-frame, she flies. I find I have the same issue with the dog walk. On the same course, I redid my dog walk, running with her to the end and she was fine, but if I pulled up, she tended to jump off. We need to do some homework on this.

We then did some jumping exercises. Elizabeth showed us how we need to be able to stand at a jump and have the dog go behind and jump towards us. We should be able to stand in any position around the jump and direct the dog.

We practiced a moving front cross and a moving post turn exercise. I need to remember not to bend over when crossing ( why do I do that anyway??)

Agility class 09/20/10

Wow Annie has been a busy girl, 2 days of obedience and then off to agility class. Surely all this getting her out will get her distraction proofed!

Today we worked on some interesting exercises. First was jumps in a grid:

___ a ____ b _____c


___ d ____ e _____f

First we did f-c-b-f with a front cross b-f. Annie handled this pretty easily after first suprising me by running over the A-frame that really wasn't part of the picture - I think it commanded a superior view from which to look for the border collies...
A second run through went well.

We then went to b-e-d-a then send to tunnel. Annie handled this well.

We then moved on to a challenging exercise. Here's the course:



Order is jump teeter tunnel jump jump - to be run as if you were coming from behind the first jump and then continuing out on beyond it on the exit. One could cross at teeter or try to call left tunnel and layer the teeter. CAll jump on exit of tunnel, do shoulder pull to second jump.

Annie's distractions got the better of her the first time through -she didn't pay much attention to me. We tried again and it was much better. She doesn't understand left tunnel from the teeter so that can be some homework for us.