I Only Blog When It's Going Badly

I have a tendency to be naturally suspicious of anyone who writes glowing, exciting blog posts when their training, handling, or competing is going perfectly, and skips over anything that isn’t fitting in to that. Especially those who then say things like “It didn’t go well, I’ve learnt a lot” and then utterly fail to explain exactly what went wrong and what they learnt.

Having said that, this isn’t a “thing are terrible” blog post.

Daisy did her first sends over an agility jump this week. I need to work on her wait (she doesn’t have one) but she drives to her toy with great enthusiasm. She is 100% ON when training, and she’s all terrier feist and killing things. She’s also going to start learning her contact position this week. Tempting as it is to try running contacts, the same applies to Daisy as applied to Rio. I have no room and no access to equipment, so she’s going to do 2o2o and she’s going to do it well.

Rio has done a lot of single jump work this week. I wanted to play around with motion-based motivation, and I also wanted to build her drive off the line. She was super, of course. She is very good at getting out of the car and working immediately, it’s when we have to wait that I tend to lose her.

She did some ball retrieves on the flat at flyball, and then did her first hits with the ball in the box. This went about as well as expected! Some nice hits, but without the ball. Some attempts at grabbing the ball, but no hits. Some hits with sort of touching the ball, but not actually fetching it. This is the hardest part of box training this way, when two things get combined, and all in all she did well. She made an effort to turn and made an effort to grab the ball as well, it’ll come together soon. Pleased with her!

Dylan’s flyball training is continuing to look good. His agility training looks great, as always. The Agility Nuts results went online and really, his times are so slow. I knew they were, but it’s worth seeing it in results order. He’s generally the slowest clear in the class (although interestingly, usually not the slowest to get around the course) and we have no where to go now in a competitive environment. He can’t reach his AW(G) collecting clear round points – we’re about 150pts short – and we’re well out of the placings.

If the courses were continually challenging, it might be worth entering for the variety, but they’re not. In terms of training skill, Grade 6 is easy for us. Partially, I’ll admit, because Dylan is slow, but also because Dylan has a high skill level when it comes to the things which are currently popular, like push-outs, independent contacts, tunnels-under-contacts, weave entries/exits. There are also two popular things which don’t suit Dylan at all, and make me worry; A) Aluminium contacts, and B) the long-jump-to-nowhere, which seems to be cropping up a lot in course designs and which Dylan struggles with physically.

So, Dyl will do Wilmslow in November, and Wyre in December, and then he retires from KC competitions. And my show diary for the winter now includes lots of unaffiliated shows for Rio.