ABCTC summer session part 2

Well up earlier than I thought (still 10:30-10:30 was a nice 12 hours) and hubby is washing dishes that he dirtied while I was gone and i am waiting for breakfast to settle so I can go and run. Like I said in my previous post, I am so excited to try the exercises we learned and set up some of the sequences we had and try running them the different ways we learned to run them. I am hoping if it isn't too horribly hot monday after class that I can do some of that. Of course Stella will be here tomorrow and we are baby sitting another puppy so I may be so busy with puppies that I won't be blogging much for a while.

So again for those of you who haven't been to this camp, the format is this: You have two rotations a day so you get two different instructors, usually one inside (ann) and one outside in the outdoor field (jen or karen). We started out with Ann which I really, really liked. We had to introduce ourselves and tell our dog's names, ages and issues. I guess we were the only group that got to do that since we were the novice dogs. Most of the people in our group had issues like start line stays, sends, getting speed, and getting your dog to stay with. I figured out right off the bat that we were probably in the wrong group, but I decided to make the most of it and learn from everyone's issues. I took away so much info on how to work through these problems that I feel my students are going to be super lucky as I really filled up my tool box so to speak. It also took pressure off of me I think to be perfect and own up to his baby dog issues. When it was my turn, I told her that he is having issues with collection and seems to run a gear or two faster in trials than in training so I am having timing issues. We learned so much about the 6 parts of linda's system and how certain things can trump others in context to a course. We also focused on running the right way and how to give "screw up cookies" when we made mistakes. This hit home for me because I am really bad about getting frustrated with myself and then letting down and then he thinks i am mad at him so he gets stressed. She was really good at pointing out when to give them and I think that really helped the slow dogs more than anything to speed up as the owners weren't blaming them for mistakes and rewarding them more thus building more value in the game. We got to run two sequences of 8 or 10 obstacles each and really talk about what options work and what options didn't for that sequence. My biggest mistake with deuce is that i take my eyes off of him to try and see where I need to be going and that is when i loose him. HUGE light bulb moment on something so simple. Also learned that sometimes, because of his speed, I need to really think hard about always putting in fronts as they are late and then loose their value. I HATE rear crosses so it is hard for me to do this but the next session with Jenn cured that hate. We ended up going way over into our lunch so we got about 30 minutes which was more than enough but then we had to drag all of our stuff outside and that was a pain. Next year, I will be for sure taking my van where I have crates already in the van and then my other lighter weight crates to drag around. My traveling buddy's car is very small so we couldn't take a lot of extra stuff so whatever they traveled in was what they were crated in at the seminar (heavy wire crates, ick).

We ended the day in Jenn's outdoor ring and talking about rear crosses. I learned SO much about all of the different kinds of rears and how to execute them correctly. My fav quote of jenn's was, "you are so worried about the off course option. Go out there, walk how you would do it if that was the correct option, then don't do that." Of course we started with rears on the flat which I thought we were good at but try doing them at a distance and not saying anything. YIKES! Once I got the body motion down, he was doing them quite well but it took me a few times. Also in this ring there was a family of voles and deuce became quite enthralled at their scent so I had a few times of calling him off of vole hunting. Guess I need to proof for voles LOL! Of all of the rear crosses at the obstacle, my favorite was the decel rear cross or the no motion rear cross. Those are my fav because they cued collection and tight turns without me having to yell or scream or do any of that silly stuff I do with deuce to get him to collect. I learned that no motion rears are very good for baby-D and that I need to really, really exaggerate my accels versus decels right now to get him to read them. Very, very cool, came out of this session with a HUGE smile on my face!

After day one, took a nice long walk around Chippewa falls downtown area and let the dogs swim and unwind. We were lucky since I can't leave baby-d in the hotel room that there were several fast food joints right next to our hotel. This pic was taken in the park before we let them swim. It was a log that was rescued out of the water and probably was over 100 years old. Very cool!