Adrenaline messes with your perspective

Today was Split's first trial back after six months of rehab. I only signed him up for 1 day/2 runs. Trying to take it slow.

His first run was Gamblers. I walked off the course after his run thinking that I had the most wild, out of control, dog not listening type of run. Just for the record I was ok with that since Split LIVES for agility and he was so glad to be going to the start line after six months.

So, I taped his standard run. I walked off that course thinking "ok, that was an improvement, but still out of control". When I replayed the run *in my head", here are some of the highlights 1) the forward send to the double, Split was amazingly wide 2) he leaped his A-Frame. 3) it took forever to get him to down on the table 4) when he was running wildly after the chute, it took 4-5 seconds to get him to come to side.

Well, I put on my big girl pants when I got home and decided to watch the run on video. I was really ready to eat humble pie, take a ton of training notes, and experience the disastrous run.

Here is what I saw 1) nice startline stay 2) beautiful teeter 3) his turn after my forward send was not nearly as bad as I recalled 4) his AFrame was TOO DIE FOR beautiful 5) huge wide turn to the weaves, he didn't read the FC 6) table speed was OK, not perfect, but certainly for six months off, can't complain 7) turn after the chute was completely my fault, I was worried about getting hit 8) beautiful, beautiful closing. Actually he would have Q'ed had I not made a handling error.

So, I find two things interesting 1) when the adrenaline is pumping, how time slows down and everything seems to take on another timeline 2) Shame on me for only recalling the bad! I knew he had a good startline, closing and some parts in between.

So, although I am only running Tip tomorrow my take aways from today are 1) film everything to get things in perspective 2) try to balance to memories of faults and beauty.

And, I will follow up with my training notes and work Split's turns this coming week :)

IHC Standard Course

This course is based off of a course we ran last weekend at the Utah 4-star. The course was designed by Tim Laubach. I had to modify it a little since I didn't have enough tunnels or a chute. #18 was a chute, and #10/#14 was a tunnel. I am sure my changes made it harder.

On the real course Tip did a fairly good job, except she broke her start line (which amazingly didn't set up off course and she had another off course (can't remember where, ops).

Today I focused on running the beginning sequence 1-2-3-4 and 4-5-6-7-8-9. I wanted to play with the different ways to cue the beginning sequence with Tip, who is obstacle focused (this makes cuing easier some times) and Split who is handler focused and if not told to do something, won't do it.

With Tip I could lead out to the landing side of 3, face her and do a cross on the flat to get #3. With Split I had to stay on the landing side of #2 and then move forward to get my cross on the flat for 3. After Split ran the course once, I could cue the same as Tip.

Next I played with how to cue 8 to 9. Tip did this fine in the trial, but I was still curious if it could be done differently. The two ways that worked were jumping her to the outside of 8, bring her to side through the gap and then cue the weaves. The other was to backup through the gap and then to cue 9. I prefer to bring her to side since it was easier for me, but this was risky with some dogs.

Tangle just got to work on individual obstacles. We worked on more introduction of the tire (no you can't touch it when jumping it).