European Open Practice

Roo and I headed up to Sacramento for three days of nonstop agility training in the heat with some pretty amazing agility handlers.  Twelve international courses completed in three days.  

A few things that I came away with from this weekend...  We can do International courses.  I think heading to tryouts, I wasn't so confident on the courses.  I definitely feel like we have improved after this weekend.  I also felt like I could trust Roo more on the courses.  Micro managing this weekend only seemed to cause bars to come down.  As for the bars, very few came down.  

The real take home from practice was that my dog is not hitting her up contact on the dog walk.  This has never been a problem since in AKC, the up contact does not get judged on the dog walk.  I've only worried about the down portion.  It wasn't on my radar until I got called on it a month ago at a USDAA trial.  I had no idea.  Roo also got called on it at tryouts in the last round.  Well, this weekend, she missed a lot of up contacts.  When she has to turn or collect, she hits it.  Otherwise, my long striding dog just glides right over it.  

Here's me ready to go into panic mode  ...  yep, she's definitely missing it!

Only three weeks to go so there's not much I can do at this point but give it my best shot at fixing it.  Today, hit-it board trianing starts! 

Jump Training

Roo's always been a pretty good jumper.  I can count the number of times she's knocked a bar at a trial and they have been  few and far between.  Three months ago, I moved her from 24 to the 26 inch jump height class.  Since then, I've seen more bars come down.  This past weekend, we NQ'd 3 out of our 4  runs because of a knocked bar.  They were all on a send.  

This morning, jump training began as I am not sure why these bars are coming down.  We did 75 jumps and 2 bars came down.  One was due to my late cue and the other from her over enthusiasm at the startline.  Otherwise, she looked good.  

Here's a video from this morning.

Later on, I came back to work on amping her up at different distances from the startline.