We missed our first week, since we were in Florida visiting the folks. While we were down there, we did get to work out with Cissy of Best Behavior Dog Training. She is awesome!
The course was outside and the first time we have ever worked away from home. Poor Waste' was so flabbergasted to have been either on a leash or in the car for 6 whole days that the freedom of the arena was too much for her to bear... all she wanted to do was run and sniff!! Cissy suggested some great things to try to increase her focus - many of which we already do, including obedience work (she's getting so good at rally!). But we did complete all the obstacles one at a time, including all 12 straight weave poles and the teeter! I expected strange obstacles to be the problem, not her focus! LOL
So now we are on our 2nd week of our new class. a new group of dogs, and you know what that means to Waste'... shall we say that our 'focus' suffered greatly.
all in all, she did well. there are 2 instructors for this class; Rosie & Lynne. both have been very successful in agility themselves. Rosie has shelties and Lynne has poodles (1 reminds me ALOT of Jocko!) we worked with Lynne last night and I like her very much. we started out with some handling and discrimination exercises.
the first exercise had us over 2 verticals heading toward both the a-frame and a tunnel. Lynne had us 'pull' the dogs thru it - we stayed on the left side and called the dogs to us thru the tunnel.
second, we jumped a vertical on a bending line to a triple bar with a front cross and hard right turn back to the tunnel. if the front cross was not done correctly, they may go off course to another vertical or up the a-frame... or, if your dog really isn't paying attention to you, they go chasing ruckus, the jack russell.
our third exercise was the same first two jumps to the a-frame and we worked on our down-side contact. Lynne asked me what kind of contacts I've been working on and i told her we've been doing 2o2o (2 on [contact], 2 off [contact]), but have been having problems with that on the a-frame. we used a target and she ran right by it. the second time thru, she stopped for it, but swung her butt around. Lynne says Waste' is trying to tell me this is too difficult for her to do and we can do a different kind of contact for a-frame only.
then we moved to the other side of the ring and worked on weaves. she did all 12 straight weave poles and even had a bit of speed with it! then, coming from the right, she got into her nose-pushing, but got thru about 10 of them... Lynne said we could leave it at that...
after that exercise, we moved on to the dogwalk and contacts there... she did great!
finally, we did jump, teeter, jump. we found that we are slowing down a bit too early, that we should wait another stride to allow her weight to drop the teeter more quickly, shaving off seconds of our time.
it was a hot evening (91), so we quit with that... came home and fell asleep on the couch in front of Law and Order. LOL
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