Agility Update

Sadie and I have been doing agility for nearly a year now (come October or November will make one year).  Sadie is having a lot of fun and really loves the sport. It's been a while since I have offered any real updates. Mostly because it's hard to photograph when you are running your dog and the videos aren't terribly exciting - mostly it's me making an ass out of myself as I screw up my footwork, body language, and verbal cues.

It's also been hard to do a lot of daily training with her. Summer is tough for me as I am still traveling to Issaquah 2X a day for work and I cannot bring Sadie to work her at lunch time. Plus I work at Bellevue College teaching that OB class which is a big time suck. Now that my schedule is a little more normal I am hoping to offer Sadie some more dedicated time.

A-frame, dog-walk, tunnels, jumps... Sadie is champ.

Overall we handle jumps well and she listens and observes directional cues very well.  We even tackled a serpentine pretty well even though it darn near made MY brain explode. The video below shows a pretty long explanation of serpentines and everything I was doing wrong. Fast forward to 4:35 to skip the boring stuff and see it all come together.

Teeter is a challenge because even though she does the actual teeter fine (no hesitation, hits her contact, and performs a 2 on 2 off *technically* correct) however we moved too quickly. My fault for not slowing down. She will stick her contact get her cookies and then releases herself before I say "okay". Under no circumstances should she ever break her contact until I tell her to. In a competition setting the pause before I say "okay" will be a nano second. However, we aren't competing and even if we were, she should stand in that spot until I say "okay" regardless of where we are. So. That is something we need to work on.

The downside of needing teeter work is we don't own a teeter, nor do we really have room to store and set one up. That really slows down the process since I can't work it at home.

Direction is something else I need to work on. I should be able to cue Sadie a direction like "Jump right"  which means turn right after clearing the jump, and "Left Tunnel" which means turn left then take the tunnel. This has been challenging.

And lastly, the weaves. The weaves are considered the most challenging to train and sadly I've left them for last. I am far behind my other classmates because I kept putting it off. I hope to have made good progress in the next couple of weeks.

Sadie looks .... cocky. Like, "Psh. I so got this." Well, I hope she's right. I'd like to see some kick ass weave action pretty soon.

Even Violet got in on the action :)

And thus concludes my agility ramble.