October CPE Agility

We did one of our first 2-day agility trial weekends in a very, very long time. Griffin and I entered a few classes on both Friday and Sunday.

This was his best trial weekend – we had one good run after the next – most of the errors were little training things or handling errors because I didn’t expect him to stay on task so well.  By the end of Sunday I was able to make better handling choices for how he was running and everything became even easier.

One of the most exciting runs was the Jackpot game on Friday. We had 33 seconds to take whatever obstacles we could for point values and then 20 seconds to do the “gamble” where I had to send him past a marked line to perform a set of obstacles at a distance. We’ve done quite a few days of CPE so far but this is one of our first traditional gambles and it was a fairly challenging one. In training I would have thought he could do it – but not in a trial.  Our point accumulation period went well – but eventually I got concerned when the buzzer didn’t sound. I was waiting and waiting and waiting while we repeated the same loop of obstacles…. finally we heard the buzzer and went for the gamble. It went as planned but right after the hardest part the ring crew started shouting about the timers not working.  Looking back, I should have just kept going… but instead I stopped and looked at the judge. He asked me to just do the gamble again – and we accidentally and successfully completed the other one available.  They did some score adjustments given our extra time (not a big deal – we repeated the same loop at least 4 times and you can only get points twice) and walked away with 61 points when most teams in our level had around 30!  Point games are definitely going to be one of our strengths!

Dogs: Four dogs is a lot. I didn’t feel like I had enough time to help at the trial – I was always walking, playing or training someone! Occasionally I would have a little extra time and catch up on work (I love trial sites with internet access!). I love trials as a place to work Viktor around other dogs. Most indoor sites are too busy for him to come in, but we get to see lots of dogs coming and going while we are training outside and we can get as close or far as we need to.

Thoughts: Why did things go so well? I think we’re mostly just at a good point in our training and Griffin’s maturity. He got a lot of exercise before his runs on Friday and less/none on Sunday and his responses were fairly consistent. We have been fairly consistent with taking 1-2 private lessons per month since June and we’ve been in an online class/program for agility that is helping me do more long, planned sequences rather than fun little pieces. I’m really looking forward to our next trials and seeing what we can do next.

Next Steps: We will be continuing in the online class and taking lessons as much as we can (our instructor only does privates one day a week and our schedule doesn’t fit well with her group classes).  We will try to balance small skill training with long sequencing training. Time to send in more entry forms for events!