Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Puppy Cannons and Apologies to the Queen!!

First, apologies to the "Queen"

We had a USDAA trial this past weekend.  The Master's judge was Dave Hanson.  Let me just say, he had fabulous courses!!  I ran all three dogs, but had it spread out enough it wasn't too bad or too crazy.

Tip (the Queen of my household), I owe you my deepest apologies!  I am sorry.  I posted on FB how well Tangle did, and completely overlooked your stellar performance.  Tip Q'ed in team, 1st in Performance Grand Prix and 1st in Performance Steeplechase.  My little almost 9 year old was amazing, fast and happy!  I was very thrilled and I love running her dearly (even if she is the hardest of dogs to run).  Sadly, I have no video of her winning runs :(

This is Tip's Standard run, fly off teeter and all!  (note the puppy cannons).


OK, on to Puppy Cannons!  And, this does relate to this past weekend.

As I said, Dave had some wonderful courses.  We saw several variations of puppy cannons on the courses which were huge challenges.  For those who are deprived enough to not know what a puppy cannon is--a pipe tunnel or straight tunnel, which when taken in full extension tends to have a multiplier affect on the dog's speed.  We saw cannon to the weaves, cannon tight turn to a jump, cannon to discrimination jumps, cannon to jump to AFrame, cannon tight turn teeter, etc..

So, I designed a course this morning that was designed to practice some puppy cannon maneuvers, mostly cannon to the weaves and cannon to backsides of jumps.  A little inspiration was throw in from Lori Michael's recent post of an international course she (designed??) and practiced.





In the design I used liberal, but standard distances.  This kept the speeds and fun as high as possible.

We will be doing this course I think for a couple of days.  The weave entries proved very hard to get at speed.  Also, I was really pushing the dogs.  I wanted to see how much motion I could keep (so I could get to the next place before them).  A challenge for us all!!

I earned my breakfast, this course kept us running!!