Boxes & FlickFlacks

Both Kim and Dylan were ridiculously excited to be at training this week. And I was a very good person and made myself do the 2 things I don’t really like doing, boxes and flickflacks (or snakes, serpentines, flapjacks, whatever you call them). I even set the box up with “Medium spacing”, ie. minimum spacing. I really dislike judges who assume because they’re judging Small or Medium dogs, everything should be tightly spaced. It’s fine to have some tightly spaced sections, as you would with a Large dog class, but doing 20 obstacles on minimum distance is awful for Kim, she has to bounce everything.

Dylan bounced his box everytime, he couldn’t work out how to fit a stride in without tripping over. Which is fine! We did have some problems because he wasn’t confident enough to bounce when I was stood inside the box, or he tried to bounce and just kind of bounced off in a random direction to avoid me. So, lesson learnt: must direct Dylan from outside the box, which is harder for me but easier for him. Kim hasn’t done any training with a box for ages and it showed … she used to be fab but it’s definitely something we need to work on.

Flick-flacks went better than expected, so I’m a little less worried about them now.

Finally, a plug for agilityOrganiser. It’s been a bit quiet lately but has been revived for the New Year. I love this site, I think it has so much potential. There is a map which shows how far competitions are away from you, and once you select a competition, all the information is given, including a list of which classes are available for your dogs. Saves scrolling through the Agilitynet list of schedules to find familiar postcodes, and opening up PDF files (I hate PDFs) to find classes.