TDAA Course Review

I’ve created a YouTube video in which I hope to demonstrate how I approach course review in the TDAA. It’s certainly not comprehensive; but it sheds a bit of light on issues like compression, and handling interest. The judge’s name has been removed to protect the innocent.

It would be a lot of fun if I could do all of my course reviews by video. There’s something that’s lost in the written word. It’s harder to explain what you mean in text, than it is to show what you mean in the illustrated and moving picture.

Here’s a link to the short video that I created: http://youtu.be/0JR0AMKAKDI

You’ll note that I’m unaccustomed to my editing tools. I hope to get better at it over time.

Ignominious

The second day of the AKC trial at the Queen City Dog Training Club didn’t go all that well for Kory and me. Both of my runs were fail. I’m quite glad that I had a couple runs that were quite superb on the first day. Otherwise I’d have looked the shambles.

There are several things that occurred to me on the drive home. I’ll take them in no particular order:

• I strikes me that the courses at which we excelled were a good match to my handling system. That means we are most likely to succeed on a type of course. I have to take my training over the winter to solve a much broader range of challenges in agility. The courses at which we failed were bloody minded things in which I had to make a choice between control positions because there was no way I could attend each.
• Even with my years of experience in agility I find both success and failure in competition begging the question of validation. In one moment I feel invincible; and in the next both out of control and unkempt. While I’m perfectly capable of losing with grace; it’s hard to have grace after a train wreck.
• I found that Kory got more and more wired through the weekend. Initially he was quite settled and working at a reasonable pace for me to attend. But as the weekend drew on he was wilder, faster and less biddable each time we entered the ring. I will have to study a calming and control warm-up. I’m thinking maybe some down on recall exercises. Something else? I’ll have to study it.

In 2011 Kory exceeded my expectations in competition. This was year #2. This winter I will train for 2012 with a checklist of goals and objectives for performance. All things being equal I think my boy is right on track.

The Joker’s Notebook Issue #1

Jokers Notebook is a periodically published dog agility training resource. This issue includes five weeks of lesson planning based on a distance training theme. Each week also features a game of the week, instructors’ notes, and a handout for students.

122 pages.

The Jokers Notebook is the natural progression and evolutions of Bud Houston’s distance training originally published as Go the Distance. These lesson plans and exercises are suitable for classroom instruction or back yard training by the intrepid enthusiast of dog agility.

Jokers Notebook #1 is an electronic book for download only.

http://www.dogagility.org/Newstore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_ID=79&ParentCat=7

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston BudHouston@hughes.net. The Country Dream web store is up and running. www.dogagility.org/newstore. You know… I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an embarrassingly inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.