Friday, April 8, 2011

Tip in Performance Speed Jumping

I need to take a moment to say how proud I am of my girl. It is moments like this that make me stop and say how proud I am of my girl, recognize and appreciate the journey that we have been on. Tip is an amazing dog who has taught me so much. The dogs that I have trained after her certainly own her.

Tip ran Steeplechase last weekend. She won both days. The second day she had the fastest time of all dogs at any jump height. Her ground speed isn't the absolute fastest, but her turns are to die for. She has turned in some amazing times because she can cut a jump amazingly tight.


Video of the run

(Yes, her time was the fastest even with the weave bobble)

Running contact update

Tangle and I took a week or so off of running contacts. We were stalled in our progress so I wanted to give it a break and give myself time to think through what my response should be. I went from thinking about scraping the running contacts to having confidence that I could figure this out. (For the record, I am still not in love with the idea of how a running contact is trained.)

This morning we started on our adventure again. I decided that practicing being stuck wasn't a good idea, so I set up our next logical progression. jump-dog walk-jump.

Today's setup



Long story short--we were back up at our 80% range. You know, I have no idea why these things work in training, but they do. Maybe one theory is, if I change something, the dog has to go back to thinking and things improve! Would love to hear thoughts on this.

On other fronts we have worked more seriously on the teeter and Tangle is learning weave entrances! He is doing stellar at both!