Spring Training Starts Soon

Jagger and I did a couple more trials, both AKC and USDAA over the rest of the winter. I only got video of his AKC debut:

Yes, lots to work on still. We did another USDAA trial a few weeks after that, and I am very proud to say he held ALL his stays. We are currently working on the outrunning the jumps issue. Our problems still come down to Jagger learning to manage his excitement (JILITIES!). We continue to make progress, but we are still chipping away at a lot of the same issues. For example –

Exhibit A:

Who uses his face as a brake on the weave pole? This guy.

Exhibit B:

Who tics the bars so much he leaves mud trails? THIS GUY!

Exhibit C:

Who needs his very own breakaway tire so he can learn to jump through the aperture instead of literally through the tire? You’ll never guess. Hint: It’s not the yellow dog.

I do have days where I get discouraged that we aren’t further along in terms of being ring-ready. In that case, I buy more collars to make myself feel better. Here’s our nifty new tug leash combo:

Safety orange for Mister “Safety Third”

In addition to the challenges of training a very high drive, fast dog for the first time, North Carolina weather never disappoints. All four seasons in the same week makes my yard a mud pit and cancels classes, seminars, and private lessons we had planned left and right from December through February. Sigh. Hoping for a better spring, soon.

 

“Speak for yourself. Snowjility now, human.”

Summer Recap

I haven’t done a blog update in a while, but I am pleased to say that for once this is because Jagger and I have been busy training! We have been (mostly) injury free, weather has been tolerable, and there is enough grass in the yard to practice agility most days if we haven’t gotten heavy rain.

I’ve got a pretty long training list, but my focus with Jagger has been on:

• startline stay
• proofing 2o2o for teeter
• thoughtful jumping effort and striding
• weave poles (the BANE of my agility existence)
• running dogwalk

That’s a long list, little buddy. You’re lucky you’re handsome.

Jagger’s main issue with jumping is that he’s in a huge damn hurry. That’s kind of a high class problem, I know, I know. He’s all about getting from point A to B as quickly as possible, and as all geometry students and border collies know, the shortest (and thus fastest) path between two points is a line. A line through the jump bar. Jagger is able to do a regularly spaced jump grid with no problem. However, when you add the speed component of a more agility course-like setup, he feels the wind in his fur, the adrenaline starts going, he does a line of coke off the first bar as he creeps up on his start line and the next thing you know we have bars and jump standards down all over the place. Jagger also likes to run around jumps, which is a typical baby dog thing to do, but again, it’s so much faster! Mayhem, I tell you. Instead of more grid work, we did these types of irregularly spaced circular grids with a tunnel for speed:

I’m told speed circles are kind of old school. Jagger says he can be retro.

Here’s our summer training all summarized in a fun little video I made, complete with running dogwalk montage:

And here’s the obligatory mass download of all the running contact video in case you are a) a true RC nerd/afficionado b) in Silvia Trkman’s online RC class again like me or c) have been struck by a sudden, uncontrollable urge to watch border collies running in slow motion to combine your love of Baywatch reruns and dog agility.

March 2013 Running Contacts Update

There always seems to be a lot of discussion surrounding running contacts regarding how to decide whether or not you “should” train them. There’s somehow the implication that you “can’t” train running contacts unless you’ve completed a checklist that says you “should.” Personally, I have always thought that there’s nothing particularly special about them and that you don’t need a reason to train them other than that you like them. They are a labor of love, they take a long time, and you need to love them to go out and train them. Case in point, here’s what our dogwalk training looked like for the month of March:

I only train them 2 or 3 times a week, and I don’t tape every session, but this is a pretty good idea of what things look like. I probably spend 10-20 min total per session which includes warm up & cool down with plenty of time to play tug and rest in between efforts.

“You told me to go back to the beginning…”

“… so I have.” – Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

I’ve signed up for another round of Silvia Trkman’s most excellent Agility Foundations class. As preparation, I made a short video of how we are coming along with the early exercises:

I also revisited a sequence we worked on last summer, and it wasn’t so pretty.

I officially never want to see this sequence again, and I have definitely over-worked it. I will spend the next couple of weeks working on shorter, 3-4 obstacle sequences that don’t have so many tight turns.

I most look forward to her advice on how to proceed with weave pole training, because stuff like this keeps happening:

“That did NOT leave a mark. I totally meant to do that!”

Princess Bride reference source 😀

Getting back on the horse… er, border collie.

Only I don’t ride him like a horse. At any rate, with the move and the new baby, my training time has been pretty limited. My new house’s back yard is in that “has to get worse before it gets better stage” of being completely unusable as a training space until we stop getting torrential rain for several weeks and my landscaper can finish grading it to fix the drainage. Apparently North Carolina has decided to have a monsoon season this year, so it may well be May or June before this work gets done. The good news is that the trees are cleared and the debris is removed, and the fence installation got started before we were once again deluged by rain. I was able to do a little training with Jagger before the trees came down and the yard really got torn up:

Jagger’s slamming the weave poles pretty badly, so we are going to have to back up a few steps and work on that when I have a regular training space again. I’ve been trying to work on his running dogwalk once a week when I can get out to a training field. It’s not ideal, but after some messing around and refreshing both our memories I was able to get to the exciting milestone of seeing his first hits on the full height dogwalk:

It’s very inconsistent, however, and Jagger really wants to switch to four strides as soon as possible (good! faster!) but he’s not extending enough and comes up short on the contact (not so good!):

So I am back to working on no-speed approaches and Get The Contact Game as here in our last session:

I was pretty happy with how this session went; I think I’ve found a good spot to work on back at the first apex where I can keep working on helping Jagger understand not to leave the downramp early. I am seeing some funky striding going on at times, and am not totally sure what’s going on with that. Maybe he is just trying to figure things out, too. I have been jackpotting every attempt that is in the contact zone at all and have rear foot separation. I just wish we had more time to practice! Hopefully by late summer my yard will be useable again, and better than ever.

GTCG Progress Update

I’m feeling much better about our contact game progress. Jagger has gotten much more comfortable being up on the horizontal plank of the dogwalk and has been clowning around quite a bit during training:

He makes me smile.

The hits from starting spots on the down ramp are looking much better. We are currently working on some tricky spots we found on the horizontal plank and also working on improving consistency across all spots up there. I still throw in some turn & go starts rather than starts from restraint when Jag starts feeling a bit tense to me. Not sure if it’s excitement or stress, but either way getting a little break from my fussing over his start spot too much seems to help him relax. Overall, I’m really pleased with how he’s doing. We certainly have a lot of work to do, but I am really excited that I am now seeing Jagger experimenting with adjusting his stride on these GTCG drills.

We also did our first attempts at an extension/collection drill… it was ugly! We started with our current cik/cap training height of the bars set at 14 inches, and after more time than I would have liked (sorry, Jagger) I did finally realize that there were just too many elements for Jagger to handle right from the get-go. He was having a hard time both collecting and organizing his jumping effort at the same time. He also continues to have some confusion about what exactly that outside arm turning cue means. After I put the bars on the ground, I did try adjust my cues some to give him more on an inside arm forward cue; we’ll have to work on that some more. I’ll be really glad when I can work this drill and not be 8 months pregnant.

Slow-motion version of the above video, cut down to a few key examples. I think it’s easier to see how Jagger’s having a hard time slowing down and also getting his weight back to jump, which results in bars coming down, turning wide, or him adding that funny extra little stride.

Dogwalk as Jungle Gym and More

Work continues on Get the Contact Game – the videos contain the commentary this time. I very much feel that I’m fumbling a bit and figuring this all out as I go along, but Jagger is a very good sport and I’m lucky in that.

I’ve also been working Jagger on channel weaves. The two videos below are of his second and third sessions on the channels with a thrown toy. I had been using a static toy, but I didn’t like the result I was getting in terms of lack of drive through the poles and understanding what was being rewarded (hitting the entry). Thrown toy is much more exciting! We are working entries right now; the channel is fully open. From past experience with Copper, I find there is absolutely no rush to close the channel, because at some point you are just going to have to open it back up to teach entries anyway. Plus, Jagger is just 13 months old this week and still too young in my opinion to be doing “real” weaving.

Finally, I have a bunch of videos to share of Jagger and I working on a new sequence for wraps and handling. We are hard at work breaking the pieces of this sequence down, working on my timing, and making sure Jagger learns to turn nice & tightly around the jumps. There was one session in there of work on the landing side turn at 2 which was giving us so much trouble that I did not film.

And I always like to share a comparison of Copper versus Jagger running the same sequence:

I find it interesting to see how differently my two dogs run.  Being the trained agility dog, Copper killed this sequence on our second try (after I remembered I can’t send him like Jagger and need to run to every obstacle because his commitment point is much closer). Jagger, as I mentioned above, had to have a lot of background work before we could put it all together, and I still don’t have the bars up all the way. But wow, he’s fast! It’s going to be a wild ride when we start running longer sequences – I can’t wait!

Getting the Contact

Jagger had been doing well enough with his last few sessions on the 36″ high dogwalk that I decided to increase the height. Unfortunately, on my dogwalk this means going  up a full foot to 48″ competition height (definitely a downside of the DIY dogwalk). Not ideal, and while Jagger has bravely run across it, he has been leaping the contact area more often than not. I believe it’s a confidence issue with his striding not being extended fully.

To bridge the gap and ease this height transition, I have been playing Silvia Trkman’s “Get the Contact Game” with Jagger. I had introduced this game before at 36″ when we were working on soft turns on exit for our online class. At this point, I also want to start to teach Jagger to understand that he needs to adjust his stride to get paws in the yellow regardless of where he finds himself on the planks. From my earlier posts, you may remember an issue where as Jagger has gained confidence he prefers to do the dogwalk in fewer strides (like, three, yikes!) and can end up missing the contact if he doesn’t have a speedy approach that supports that much extension.

Here are two videos from our recent sessions. It’s a little ugly, and I’m sorry to say my eyeballs need some training on the starting spots. Seeing the video really does help me learn from these sessions, and I hope to make some improvements in my spot selection in the future.

Spot 1 appears to be a good/easy spot for him to hit with his natural striding, whereas spots 2 and 3 are in between. I need to work spot 1 some more, and then pick a “new” spot 2 that is further back from spot 3 so that it matches up with his natural striding. In the long run, I want him to hit well from the intermediate, harder spots too, but right now they appear to be too challenging because I see him hitting or not mostly by chance rather than making a stride adjustment like he did on spot 1.

This was my effort to work on spot 1 after three warm up trials on a closer spot. I had a few issues, but did finally get it together there at the end. Poor Jagger… he’s a good kid.

One big improvement I’ve made to this round of GTCG is finally breaking down and teaching Jagger to get himself on the dogwalk and make a u-turn to set up for this game. So, unlike last time I am not lifting him which means he is not jumping into my arms of his own accord when I’m not ready yet and doing things like this to my arms with his dewclaws (which, in his defense were overdue for a trim that day):

Progress is measured in small steps, sometimes. No blood is always a good step.

DIY Dogwalk

One aspect of training running contacts is that it does require regular access to a full size dogwalk. I retrained Copper from 2-on/2-off without regular access to a dogwalk and it was more difficult – I couldn’t get a stable setup with a plank and a table taller than about 16 inches, and then had to go right to full height dogwalk in classes. I’ve never been completely happy with Copper’s dogwalk performance. There are several reasons for that, but one of them is probably the training setup we used. Copper at least had been on a competition height dogwalk plenty of times before, but as Jagger was starting with a blank slate, I knew I wanted to have a better setup, and I wanted a different end result in terms of obstacle performance. I also live too far away from any of the area training fields to make rental a feasible option.

Dog’s eye view

Originally, I had an order in for a commercially made, aluminum framed, rubber surface dogwalk. But, right around the time I came up on the waiting list I also found out I was pregnant with my first child (yay!). Given that news and all the baby stuff we were going to have to buy in the not-too-distant future along with an urgent need to move to a bigger house, dropping a couple grand on a new dogwalk suddenly wasn’t in the budget. Fortunately, there are other options for the economy-minded. After some research, I decided to buy a PVC frame kit from Affordable Agility which could be built at 36″ or 48″ heights. This would also require me to furnish my own planks, which I decided to surface with a rubber pellet kit from Contact-A-Coat. It took me a few weekends, mostly in waiting for paint to dry and resin to cure, but it was pretty easy with a garage to work in out of the weather and some basic tools (screwdriver, drill, hammer, paint roller and tray, containers for staging rubber pellets, nitrile gloves to protect my hands, old sheets to protect the floor). Here are the materials:

• PVC base kit (http://www.affordableagility.com/dogwalkbases.htm) – $344.75 including shipping
• 12′ x 12″ x 1″ wood dimensional lumber board (not pressure treated, those are too heavy) from Lowe’s Home Improvement, 3 @ ~$18/ea- ~$60
• Valspar exterior latex primer, 1 gallon – ~$15 (the sales guy really tried to convince me that the paint/primer combo was the way to go but I wanted as much protection for the wood as possible from rot, and while it’s affordable paint, I don’t find the coverage from Valspar paint at Lowe’s to be that great without several coats)
• Valspar exterior semi-gloss latex paint, 1 gallon – ~$30 (you could probably go even cheaper by buying a “oops” color, but none were available the day I went)
• Dogwalk combo kit (http://www.contactacoat.com/contactacoat-kits/combo-kits/) – $190.20 including shipping
• Finishing nails to hold gum rubber slats in place during curing – ~$1.50
• CMU blocks for heights lower than 36″, 12 @ $1.50/ea – ~$20

Total cost: $661.45

Let’s call that roughly $675 compared to the roughly $2,000 I was looking at for an aluminum dogwalk with a pre-made rubber skin, which doesn’t even include shipping. It’s not going to last forever, and you have to be a little creative to do height adjustments and make sure the equipment is stable on the CMU blocks, but I am really happy with how the equipment turned out.

Here’s what the assembly process looked like:

Bare wood planks, ready for work to start in my garage

Primed

Painted planks with the rubber kit. I could have painted the planks to match the rubber chips for improved appearance, but taping seemed like too much work.

Layout of slats on planks – measure twice, glue once!

Rubber just after application with the resin. Note finishing nails used to temporarily tack down the slats; they had a tendency to slide all over while the resin was wet. My back was killing me after I finished! In retrospect, saw horses would have been a worthwhile side project.

Here is one example of the finished dogwalk (sans hardware) set at 8-inches training height on CMU blocks. Note the small sand bags I used to stabilize the planks on the blocks. The setup worked much better once I had the hinge hardware attached to hold the planks together as it helped get the slight warp out of the boards. Ideally I would have had the hardware installed from the beginning.

Finished dogwalk at 48-inch competition height. The set screws that come with the kit to attach the plank to the PVC frame are *not* long enough and the washers rust, so plan on buying some 3 1/2″ long deck screws and stainless steel washers to finish the project and ensure that the planks are stable. There is about an inch and a half of play on either side of the planks within the PVC supports, and there is a chance it could slip while in use without the screws. Downside of screws is a dog could catch a toe, so also consider covering them with some foam.

The most favorite toy

This is the Most Favorite Toy.

The precious.

It has magic powers. It makes Copper do hilarious stuff like this:

One man party!

And it lets Jagger do all kinds of things like this:

Foundations class has been a TON of fun. So many things to work on!

The A-frame is looking a little squirrely on the down ramp. We’re going to take a break from this obstacle until the dogwalk is more solid; I think there is some confusion here, and really there is no rush.

Our wraps to the left are a little wide; since the video was taken we’ve been working on tightening those up. It’s kind of ironic, because the week before the wraps to the right were looking wide and we worked on those a lot. Now they look better but the ones to the left need more attention. Just a quick aside, I found this comparison of my two dogs running the same sequence pretty interesting:

There’s about a four second difference between Copper and Jagger, and Copper is actually moving very quickly for him through all these wraps. No wonder I am having some trouble with my timing!

Finally, as you can see toward the end of the first video, I have Jagger back on the dogwalk. This was the first time he’d seen the dogwalk in about a month, and I was very, very pleased with how he did. He seems to have figured out his legs again, and I have been making a point of waiting for him to calm down a little bit between runs. I think he gets a big adrenaline hit from all that running, and I have noticed that he can’t always get himself unlocked out of the “border collie crouch” and into a heel or side position. The NR attempt on the video was the time he had the most trouble getting into a thinking mode. We’re going to continue to work on this and emphasize quality over quantity… this will take much self-control on my part, too, because running contacts are so darn fun!