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!!
