Class update

She makes it easy. Carrie agreed and said she will be the kind of dog that will 'save my butt when I really need it'.

We got there early to do our 1on1 contact work. We had a couple of problems w/the dogwalk to begin with and it was more MY lack of confidence than hers. After a couple of trys, she was back to her old 'tackle it' attidude. The we hit the A-frame a few times - no problem there. Then Carrie set up the teeter to try a new exercise. She put each end under a table; the start table higher than the end one. The object is to move from one table to another. Waste' did not even blink. She rode that teeter down like she's been doing it all her life. We did all this in less than 15 minutes, so we took a break before class started.

The first half of class we did grid work. Christie began explaining the exercise and I had to interrupt her. I made the observation that this is gridwork and it is designed to teach her to rock back and round over her fences to jump in a better style. I told her that I had trained horses for 30 years and I may not know about agility, I do know about jumping! She got pretty excited and said I could probably teach her a few things.

It was first set up as 3 bounces to a one stride. As the height increased, she began to jump like a pretty little hunter! Dang, she can be good with those wheels. Then we worked on a half-circle exercise: 3 jumps set up on a pinwheel; all three left-hand standards touching each other. She got that pretty easily too.

She was also pretty pooped by the end of the first half hour. With Carrie we put some consecutive obstacles together including working on obstacle descrimination. A tunnel was placed under the A-frame so both entrances to the tunnel framed the face of the A-frame. The object of the exercise is to send her to the tunnel and not the A-frame. She nailed it each and every time. The we did some serpentines. She nailed the serpentine so well, Carrie had Christie come watch. Christie made the comment that this is a very advanced exercise. (see me brimming with pride).

Then we worked on the training weave poles at about a 2" spread. The only problem she had was with the one short pole... she kept missing that one...

Since she nailed every thing we asked her to do on the coursework, we quit a bit early.