A Secret Mission

A Disappointing Weekend of Agility

After how well Cisco had been doing in Paulena’s class, I had really high hopes for this weekends trial. Really, I guess I don’t have much to complain about as overall we didn’t do so bad, but we’re still not clicking at trials.

Saturday I tried something different for his first run in Standard. Since in class we don’t go through this big warmup routine before he runs, I got him out of his crate like 4 dogs before his run, threw him over the practice jump once and then went in the ring… no treating before hand, just totally casual like we are in class. The course started off jump, dog walk, jump, a-frame. By obstacle 7 all the contacts were out of the way and it was like a jumpers course with a table thrown in the middle. I think he missed his dog walk contact (he didn’t stop for sure), and he jumped off the a-frame about halfway up, so I pulled him. I hated pulling him because I really wanted to run the rest of the course, but I needed to stick to my criteria. He went back to his crate with no treats.

JWW started out pokey. I tried cheering him on in his pokey weaves (5th obstacle) which pulled him out. We started the weaves again with a lot of “ready”s and picked up speed considerably. After that we flew through the rest of the course and were clean.

Sunday we had a really nice standard run (except for the weaves). Vicky even commented on how fast he was moving. Our JWW run was nearly a repeat performance of the day before with a very poor handling decision on my part — I had plenty of time to do a front cross and didn’t do it, so instead of tried a very poorly timed rear cross.

I need to figure out what we can do to make agility trials more fun and exciting for Cisco. He did so well in class, but he’s just a different dog at the trials.