February 2011- A Month in Review

The Paps
-Took Knight to the "Foundation for Excellence" workshop by Silvia Trkman
-Had a private lesson with Silvia Trkman
-Lilly's running dog-walk is looking pretty solid now
-Started working on Knight's running dog-walk more

The Handler
-Shot a new personal best, 465
-Completed Forensics course
-Completed Mystery and Scifi course

February 2011
Wow, let me just say that 2011 is hanging on to that great start! The paps took a break from trialing while I ran around with the X-team shooting targets most of the weekends. The Silvia seminar and private were amazing. I'm so proud of both of the paps, and can't wait for our trialing season to start up again!

Our Hearts Still Beat Below

You'll notice some of the events on the right side of this blog have been bolded. That means that I've mailed out the entries. Once The even closes I'll edit the days we got in, so the list is every changing haha.

Along with the entries, I put everything together to get Knight registered with the UKC. Hopefully they take care of those in a timely manner. I'd like to hit the UKC conf ring with Knight at the end of April, hopefully Leap (a smooth BC) will be debuting with us.

We Rise and Fall Together

The paps are loving the appearence of grass! We decided to celebrate with a game of fetch. Knight usually waits for Lilly to get the ball, pulls on her ears until she lets go, then brings the ball back to me. Lilly tries her best to ignore Knight and really, really, REALLY just wants me to throw the ball.

We Are The Bleeding Hearts

The weather was to die for today, so I took the paps to the park for a bit. It was muddy, and the streams were overflowing so we didn't do our usual walk around the "lake". Instead we just ran back and forth in the area before the first overflow site. They had a blast, and got to use some of their agility skills in the real world.



This is Lilly's "I'm not amused" face



Private Lesson With Silvia Trkman

Today we went back down to Richmond for our private lesson with Silvia. She was once again amazing. She suggested I continue trialing Knight at 8", but do training more on 6" for now. Since 8" really is a lot for the little guy, so this should help give him more confidence jumping again and help him stop over collecting.

She had me do some much tighter handling with Knight and he LOVES it. Since he's so tight I hadn't put much thought into putting effort towards making him tighter... But once I started handling so he had more direct lines he was much more comfortable. It's absolutely something I'll continue to work on :)

We also have a LOT of Running Contact work to do with DK still haha. Totally leaping off the A-frame the majority of the time.

Lil was a bit unfocused, I think the mix of a new setting, plus warm weather, plus grass instead of snow, was a lot for her. She had some really really great weaves, and a beautiful running contact though. She also didn't wander too much at all which is HUGE improvement from even just a year ago. I'm going to do some Cik Cap work with her soon so she can get some tighter turns in there too.

Overall it was an amazing day. I'll sign up for a Private with Silvia again in a heartbeat.

Here's One For the Friction Makes

So today, while I was pounding through some school work I got a phone call from the Richmond SPCA. Turns out they had one Private lesson space open for Sunday. So the HeavensGlory paps are going back down to Richmond for a private with Silvia Trkman! Diana's parents are letting us stay at their house Saturday night, then driving down to Richmond in the morning.

Tonight was class night, I went to the Open/Advanced class and both paps just blew me away.

Knight- I really feel like we're started to get that teamwork thing, I mean, I had a fumble here and there, but DANG BOY! He was awesome! I still can't believe Letty gave me such a steller little man :) He brings all the awesome to the table, I'm just along for the ride.

Lilly- SPEED DEMON LILLY! You maniac where did this come from?! Denise thinks that Lilly had lymes for a while before she started limping last year, because the difference of watching her run this winter is SO different from the Lilly I was running last spring. Even though I screwed up big time Lil took in all with that goofy grin on her face and just had the time of her life.

I'm Singing This One For The Sparks

Did some more board work with the paps today. Lilly has a "target" (which is really just a Micheal Jackson CD) that she runs out to. That helps keep her focus forward, once we go outside I'll switch it up to a tunnel or a jump but I have pretty limited space in the basement. I really like how hers are looking.  Everytime she runs she gets at least 3 small treats, the one time she jumped I just turned around and went back to the mattress. She got the message, followed me, and hasn't jumped since.

Knight can't run out to a target, He jumps every time I set something out for him, so I set up a cone about 4 feet from the board for him to run to then go around. That seemed to work very well, So I'll continue using that while we're indoors. Slowly moving the cone farther and farther away.

Here are the video's from today's sessions, kept them short, sweet, and fast.

I Wanna Sing One For All the Dreamers

Going back to the basics for our RC work. The board was propped up on a mattress, so it was about 10" off the ground.

Silvia Trkman: Foundation for Excellence Seminar

Silvia Trkman is awesome. There ended up being about 7 dogs there doing the workshop, and 3 of them were papillons :) I met two other great agility juniors. One, Selina, had papillons, the other, Hannah, I had actually "met" on youtube. She owns Chance and Bouncer so it was really cool meeting both of them.

First of all, I love how Silvia showed the same amount of respect to everyone working with their dogs. Adults and teenages a like. She let our teamwork show how much we had accomplished before she made any comments.

Silvia trains her weaves using the channel method. I personally have always strongly disliked this method, mostly because I've seen so many people train it incorrectly. They also don't have access to the weaves at home, so it's trained in a painfully slow fashion.

Hearing her explain how she trains them shed new light on them. So much so that I might just give it a shot with my next dog. She starts with an open channel (all 12 poles), at the other end she puts either a toy or a bowl with food in it. Then has the dog run through. Once the dog understands that he's to run through she starts doing something different every time the dog runs through. She'll stay back, rush ahead, run away from the weaves, turn around and run backwards, dance, toss toys, everything she can think of. Then she'll move them closer and continue to do the same.

Depending on the size of the dog, the poles will be 6-10" apart when she starts working every possible entry. At this point the dog isn't totally doing the weaving motion and still has that nice "tunnel" of sight down the middle to help direct them a bit. Still adding in whatever she can think of like jumping jacks so the dog really understands that their job is to weave all the way through no matter what she might be doing.

If done correctly, then in about 20 sessions the dog will have all 12 poles, nice speed, independence, and solid entries.

Very cool, and very different from the channel training I've seen at agility classes.

Anyway... onto what I got from the seminar to use with Knight. Silvia really helped my become more aware of my handling, actually the timing of my handling really.

Front crosses- With Lilly the timing evolved naturally, I'm not really sure how it happened but I started doing it properly, as she was in the air over the jump I'd be doing the cross. With Knight, since I never really knew what I was doing with Lilly, I haven't timed my handling at all. He'd land after then jump and maybe even take a stride or two before I completed the cross. The end result was Knight dedicating to one direction, then swinging back to me.

Once as I got closer and closer to timing the front cross correctly, his line to the next obstical got smoother and smoother. This is possibly one of the most important things I need to work on I think. Simply because Knight's stride is so small, he has to do a lot of running to get around that course. Making sure I show him clear lines will make things much easier for him.

Turn signals- The second thing I really need to work on. Using the other hand to signal wraps and things like that. Knight is more motivated when I keep moving as opposed to me staying static on the turns. So that's something else I need to keep in mind :)

Jump "drills"- One exercise that we did that I really loved consisted of two jumps and two tunnels, kind of laid out in a circle. So the two jumps were next to each other in front of both ends of the tunnels. Then we worked on the 3 different turns a dog will see on the course. First we just did the cirle, kept shoulders straight to cue the dog that it could extend its stride. Then we did a 180 turn, so you'd send your dog in one tunnel, then turn your shoulders as he was about to take the jump so he knew to ignore the tunnel and turn towards the second jump. And Lastly we did wraps, where the dog would come out of the tunnel, you'd cue the turn with the opposite hand so the dog knew the cross was coming and send them right back into the tunnel end they came out of.

I can't wait for the snow to melt so I can try it out with Lilly :)

All in all, it was a great day. I loved Silvia, she was great at watching both the handler and the dog, and knew how to smooth out everyone's runs a bit.

Written In The Stars

Ahhhhh! Less than a week until the Silvia Trkman seminar! I have a feeling it's going to be a lot of BCs... and then Kngiht LOL. He was really good at the pet expo about not snarling at dogs. I did notice that as the day went on it took less and less to get a snarl out of him. He actually snapped at Kallie (a friend's ACD) when she got too close to my sandwhich. So we still have some things to smooth out... But progress is good, no matter how small.

I filled out the entry forms for Lilly's CPE trial, and Knight's TDAA trial today. Hopefully I'll mail those out by the end of the week :)