Griffin's First Agility TrialIn 2012 I intended to be doing a lot of trials and events with all the dogs. It didn’t happen.  Blaze did one day of rally and Griffin did one day of agility. But we did a lot of seminars and my notes say we did at least 26 days of seminars.  Some were behavior related seminars, some seminars for competition obedience, one day of agility, and a few days of field training.   We got to learn from high level competitors in 4+ different sports (the similarities deserve their own post). We did so much learning and I have so much to train my dogs.

We’ve already got a few seminars and classes to go to for 2013, but we’ll be cutting back a little and spend more weekends at trials.   We’ll be putting all of our training and learning to use.  Blaze and Griffin already have some events for January and much of our daily training is working towards being ready for those events.

Here’s a video of us doing a practice run through on our own for a Novice obedience class:

And here’s one of Griffin doing a run through and a little training of a few exercises from AKC’s Advanced Teamwork class:

We’re doing a lot of run throughs on our own and with our training groups. In between, we’re working on all of the weak areas.  I take video of our sessions at least weekly and using that information to help me get better at handling and notice parts of training that we need to work on.  It can be painful to watch all of my errors, but it does keep me more objective than I can be without the video.


4 Comments

Laura, Lance, and Vito · December 20, 2012 at 4:37 am

Yay, I didn’t know you were training for advanced teamwork! If you feel like heading to MN, I got TCOTC to have the class offered at their october trial!

    afmd7525 · December 20, 2012 at 1:33 pm

    Laura – Is it rarely offered? I desperately need to come up to visit Megan. It was an impulse decision to enter. Non-regular classes are much less expensive than regular classes and we aren’t ready for regular classes. My dog can’t stay well enough. I wanted to do something to get my dog familiar with the trial site. And he knew many of the exercises already (side effect of taking a class from someone who does FCI obed). PS- your blog won’t let me comment. I tried as a gmail account, wordpress, and anonymous. on a lot of different days. It’s been a problem for the past month or two.

      Laura, Lance, and Vito · December 22, 2012 at 3:14 am

      I know around here I have never seen it offered, but there are never ANY non regular classes offered. It was hard to get my club to offer it since they actually couldn’t find a judge willing to judge it and plus I had already convinced them to add the new “pre” classes which will take up a lot of judging time. Fortunately since it’s non-regular, anyone with a utility title can judge adv teamwork.

      Impulse decision to train for it or to enter? You already entered to do it somewhere near you?!’

      Don’t know about the comment thing. I’ve played with several settings in the past. oh well.

        afmd7525 · December 22, 2012 at 4:12 pm

        We entered without thinking it through. It’s going to be about giving him more ring experience, not necessarily doing anything well. We’re spending very little time on the training. This trial has a lot of non regular classes offered and even made up one of it’s own. I haven’t done enough obedience [any] to know how often it’s offered down here or how well received by exhibitors. Theoretically my dog can do it all… whether or not it happens in the ring is another story, we haven’t proofed or done as much ring prep for this as we are with the regular classes.

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