Tactical Waits

Dylan and I are trying a new approach with waits. Or at least, I am. I haven’t outright told Dylan about it, it’s more of a sneaky tactic type thing.

Dylan’s wait has gone right out of the window in the past 6 months, although he’s always had a shufflebum wait. I’m not very good at training waits, I don’t know if anyone has noticed. Kim definitely doesn’t have one, Mollie’s is too sticky (and I can’t even take credit for that) and Dylan’s has been deteriorating for about 3 years. I’m also very aware that Dylan doesn’t have Kim’s acceleration from a standing start, so I can’t use a running start with him, especially on the more difficult G5+ courses.

What I have also struggled with for the past few weeks is that Dylan will wait for hours, providing he’s on the end of a contact plank. He understands the concept of waiting there, at that point, but not in generalised terms. I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s just trying to be sneaky. He knows I can see if he’s moved from his wait on a contact point, but of course, if I leave him in a sit/stand/down and walk away, how can I tell if he’s moved when I turn around? This sounds to me like Dylan’s kind of thinking. It’s why I don’t speak Dylan very well sometimes; he thinks in straight logic lines, which don’t always quite match reality. I’m not very logical, hence why I have only just — possibly — figured out this wait problem. Incidentally, Kim is more with the sneaky bitch thinking-around-corners tactics. I don’t know what it says about me that I can see exactly what she’s thinking, quite often before she’s thought of it herself.

The new plan is to be really boring if Dylan breaks his wait. If he holds his wait, we get to play race-chase games all over the golf course. I am not convinced this will work in agility, to be honest, because I don’t want to have to be boring at agility. On walks, it works, for the moment. Dylan breaks, I tell him he’s an idiot and we wander on for a bit, and then we try again. He holds his wait, we get to play.

It is really hard for me to watch him break his wait and then acknowledge him, albeit in a boring way. For some reason I’ve always had it drilled in to me that if he breaks his wait, take him back immediately to where he started from. I have no idea why I persisted with that method, because, again, I’m not very good at training waits. You’d think I’d have realised by now.

I’ll see what happens at agility training next week.