Dylan's Blog – Weaves, again

Finally got a day suitable for practising on the weaves, and the boy did good!

He definitely seems to understand weaving, and if anything he’s a little overenthusiastic! The only problems I’ve encountered are when I leave him in a wait and move on ahead. But this is a problem I have with other obstacles, not just the weaves. At the moment he is watching me so closely he isn’t focussing on whats right in front of him, but he’s definitely improving and I actually managed a couple of straight recalls through the poles today, which I’m thrilled about! This was the one area I thought we might have serious problems with, but I can see now that I just have to make sure he is focussed when I leave him in the wait.

Speaking of waits, we proofed those as well today. He broke one towards the end, but that was my fault – I turned my back on him for too long trying to work out where I was and he got worried.

Anyway, I meant to take my camera and then forgot, so I set the weaves up on my driveway when I got back for a quick video. The first set of weaves is from the beginning of January, when I also had to set up on the driveway to get the video! Running on concrete doesn’t exactly show the poor lad to his best advantage, and it’s certainly not something I like doing, but here’s the video anyway:

http://www.undermybed.co.uk/images/dylanweaves.wmv
(click and it should open in Windows Media Player)

We also worked on hitting the weaves at speed, which is something I haven’t really done until now. Dylan surprised me again! He’s getting pretty good at adjusting his stride and getting the entry. We started out from about 10m and then worked back to about 20m, either leaving him in a wait or racing him to the first pole.

I guess the next thing on the list is weave entries, which I’ve always partially done, but never any particularly severe angles. I also need to start proofing the weaves elsewhere. Dylan is almost 100% in our usual training spot, but he’s not as solid when we train at Wakefield. Unfortunately I can’t get up to training this weekend, but I think I might be able to snag half an hour in the local park on Sunday morning. But it is flyball tomorrow, for the first time in ages, so I’ll have to see how tired he is!

One last photo of him, taken after our weaving session, on the left. He’s not stood quite straight so he looks a bit weird, but I couldn’t get him to stand wait whilst I was trying to take a photo.