Here's Hoping we Love 2012 as much as 2011 !

Not to say that 2011 was all smooth sailing in regard to training and trialling ... oh no, it certainly wasn't.
But as an introduction to trialling for Ivy, I don't think she could have had any more fun than she did, plus I have learnt more this year than any other year, mainly due to having lots more questions and needing to find lots more answers- many of which I am still looking for.

We had a break from agility training over December and have just started out again last week - as you can see I had a nice relaxing time, but Ivy was less than impressed that the agility area had suddenly become out of bounds.
Anyway, here are some of the things I  learnt in 2011.

1. Video editing.
Up until last year, my video analysis went something like this : record it, watch it, be very down on myself at how crap I thought I handled a particular sequence, save it, never watch it again.  The fact that this was 'Pre-Flip' and my old video camera recorded to those little tapes and is a pain in the butt to download into the computer may have had something to do with it, but I can't believe I wasted such a great training tool all these years.   And is why I am now rabbiting on about my very mediocre video editing skills that most likely make everyone else roll their eyes and think BIG DEAL !  Because it has been a big deal for me.

I enrolled in a few online courses last year - in particular to work on my mental management skills so that I could stop doing things like being down on myself because I thought I handled a particular sequence like crap.  I started with Daisy Peel's 'Mental Management', then moved on to John Cullen's 'The Winning Process'.  More on those shortly, as I am trying to stay on task with the video editing, LOL.
Anyway, one of the things I learnt in Daisy's course was how to slow down a clip to half speed, and how to split a clip to get rid of the parts you don't want.  Pretty basic stuff, but not something I have ever thought of doing before so have never bothered to find out how.  Then on John's course, he talked about making a video montage from your trials to motivate you when you watched it and after a couple of other people shared examples of theirs, I decided to have a go with some of the footage that I have from our first few months of trialling as a record of our first (partial) year in the trial ring.  So this is the result.

Even though we have a long way to go, it does make me smile to watch this and see just how much she really  enjoys  running agility.  Especially as the number one prerequisite in an agility partner for me is one who enjoys running as much as I do, if not more. Oh, and to see my new found video editing skills too of course, LOL.
Plus I can watch this back and still see places where my handling was not quite spot on (at times I can almost hear my old ballet teacher yelling 'look at those feet' ) - but it doesn't bother me any more, I no longer feel that I am 'crap' and merely see it as information I can now use to improve.  So the next thing I have learnt is :

2. Making handling errors is OK and you are not useless just because you do.
Not feeling as emotionally involved when I watch myself run any more - sure there are still some occasions when I handle sequences like crap, but this doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as it used to - thank you Daisy and John !

3. Goal Setting
Another really useful thing I learnt from both courses.  Especially now that I am using it not so much as goal setting to achieve particular things, but to develop my training focus around it as well.   In the past I have been pretty much a 'putting out fires' type of trainer where I mainly focussed on what I stuffed up at trials.  No more.  This doesn't mean I don't give that any attention, but it's not my main training focus.  And my computer skills are improving as I can now make pretty spreadsheets and tables and stuff - is there a theme developing here?

4. Help is only a 'Paypal' payment away !
2011 has certainly been the year of online agility related courses ..... which can get pretty expensive and can also make a bit of an online junkie out of you and which my bank account says I will be much more conservative and discerning about what I sign up for this year.  But for someone who lives in the great agility wasteland of my state - nowhere near the 'fashionable' clubs where all the up to date agility training takes place - these courses have been like letting loose in a candy store.  You want help with training, handling, mental skills and have no one to help you in real life ?  Never fear, just give us vast quantities of your money and we will help you. Praise the Lord ...... Agility Salvation !

My favourites courses (so far, LOL) for 2011 :

*Daisy Peel and John Cullen - I am listing these as a 'package'.  Daisy's course was a lot simpler to understand and gave me the basics, not to mention really got me motivated, so money well spent.  (Plus I like Daisy a lot from her 'conversations' and respect her as a trainer, even though she doesn't worship at the temple of GD like I do but is a LM follower... religion doesn't matter to me !)  John's course is in a lot more detail and is an excellent follow on to Daisy's as it expands on a lot of the concepts that she introduced so if you want to get into it in more detail, then you can.  Also very professional in the way that he presents his information and very generous in what he shares.  Big thumbs up from me !

*Greg and Laura Derrett - Ultimate Handling
I wasn't going to sign up for this one initially due to the cost, but boy am I glad I did !  Freaking brilliant - and well worth the money.  Really smart sequences that allow you to get to position early enough to get it right from the beginning.  (Well, almost right anyway )  Thumbs up and fingers up too ( in a nice way of course)

*Susan Garrett - Puppy Peaks
Apart from the monthly payment option, the thing I have enjoyed most about this is watching Susan deal with 'issues' (or at least potential issues because she is savvy enough to nip them in the bud long before the rest of us even realise they are turning into issues) that arise along the way and to see that she doesn't necessarily start with a 'perfect' puppy and that she also makes errors sometimes and is not 'perfect' either.
Plus apart from getting an awesome 'blueprint' to train a puppy (must not be tempted!) you can really learn a lot from Susan about good training mechanics ..... being prepared, not wasting time, rewarding in the right place from the right hand, etc.  Downside is that it makes you wish you had a puppy to start doing all these amazing things with all over again (must not be tempted !)

5. 'Issues' are not problems and are just training opportunities.
We survived the start line issue and the no longer waiting for release on contacts issue.  I blew several runs dealing with these things- a number of which would have been clear if I had let the behaviours go, but it was well worth it and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
The current issue is whether or not the 'just one bar' runs (of which there are numerous) is actually an issue or not.  That sounds confusing even to me and I wrote it !

The last couple of trials for the year I didn't enter agility, as we finished our AD and I didn't want to start trialling with a full height seesaw (which she can do but I haven't proofed to what I would consider trial standard) when we are changing to the ridiculous 'weesaw' from this year.  Let's not even bother with what I think of that rule change !  So we entered Open Jumping for the first few times instead.  Ivy is mad for running agility but she is even crazier for jumping and I think the agility runs are actually a bit settling for her when they are mixed in with the jumping runs.   I learnt that entering only jumping runs is like crack to an addict and when you team those with a ridiculous amount of big, open flowing courses that are designed to test very little except how fast you can run and how many bars your dog can keep up while you are running like a madwoman, well..........

The results were : 3 Excellent Jumping runs on 'Yeeee- haaaar' courses with just one bar down on each one. (2 were totally my fault and the other I'm not sure) Another Excellent Jumping run with one bar down on a very technical course - not sure why the bar came down. Two Open Jumping runs on yet more 'Yeeeee- haaaar' courses with one bar down each time - one my fault and the other caused by her catching her foot on the distance tape.  I knew something NQR had happened on that run, but until I saw the video afterwards wasn't sure what.
Plus one 2nd place NQ in Novice Gamblers where she ran the opening like a dream but unfortunately it was the gamble from hell (that was set up identically for Masters, with just the tape moved further away) and only one Novice dog actually managed to do it, which was pretty impressive actually.

I'm trying not to stress about the bars a great deal.  Ivy gets very excited on 'Yeeee- haaaaar' courses and the more excited she gets, the earlier she tends to take off.  She is a big jumper (as in distance), puts minimal strides between jumps and there are definitely going to be 'bad bar days' every now and then.  I can accept that. 

I love the way she is so confident running agility and I definitely don't want to do anything to change that so I will continue to try very hard not to react when the bars come down.  I believe there are some bars that will come down that I can't do anything about, but I also think that quite a few that she dropped over the last couple of trials were my fault (head check often equals bar down)  so I am certainly going to try and do something about that this year.
The hardest thing about this 'issue or not issue, still not sure what category to put it in' is that I am so not used to running a dog that pulls bars.  I could count the number of bars my kelpies have dropped in their entire trialling career on one hand - so this is a totally new experience for me. 
Hence the reason that I can't decide whether I should worry about it or not and something else I need to learn.

For the moment I am taking the attitude that if it doesn't particularly worry Ivy then it doesn't particularly worrry me........... and for every bar that came down in the last couple of trials, there were around 16 or so that stayed up!  

6. I think I totally hate 'Yeeeee-haaaaar' courses.
(Just wait, once we do finally hit Masters Jumping I will most likely be complaining about how tight and twisty the courses are, LOL)

Merry Christmas

Ivy would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas !  She is now off to play with her new tug toy while she is waiting for a batch of (dog) biscuits to come out of the oven.  Such is the life of an agility princess !

Our year in review :  Coming soon.....

Family Reunion

Ivy got a lovely surprise at the Ballarat trial a couple of weeks ago - a chance reunion with her brothers who came all the way from Western Australia.



What a good looking bunch !



That's the very handsome and talented Dan on the left - a full brother to Ivy from an earlier mating. Dan is an awesome agility dog and if Ivy turns out to be half as good I will be over the moon. 

That's the gorgeous and very exuberant Quinn on the right - a half brother to Ivy as they share the same father.  The first three words that come to mind when watching Quinn run are fast, fast and fast - did I mention he was really fast ???  Definitely a potential superstar in the making there.

It might not seem all that exciting to catch up with relatives for those who do it on a regular basis (yes, I'm talking DOGS - LOL) but for the little girl who moved from one side of this big country to the other it was an out of the ordinary event that we were not expecting to happen so most definitely 'blogworthy'.  Hopefully we will meet up again if we end up making the trip to Nationals next June.

We have just returned from a full weekend trialling at Warrnambool - Ivy had a ball and was just as enthusiastic at the end of the second day as she was at the beginning of the first.  Wish I could say the same about me !  We finally managed to break the cycle of 'just one little thing and always something different' in Novice Agility when she won the ring on Sunday morning to complete her title.  Best thing was that her contacts were great on every run and she didn't self release once - I even chose a run where she had already knocked a bar to run past the end of the dogwalk and continue ahead without releasing her and she stuck her position perfectly. 

Our Summer project (after she has a break for a few weeks) is to really work on proofing those contacts and improve her confidence in driving to the end position that I want.  I was so despondent about her contacts after Sale at the beginning of the month, but a couple of weeks of 'extreme consistency' in regard to criteria really appears to be making a big difference to her performance.  Now that I have stopped obsessing about speed over the contacts at all costs and am more concerned about the consistency of her performance,  her 'slow-ish' (in relation to the end picture that I have in my head)  contact performance is suddenly speeding up anyway.  Another lesson learned the hard way.  I still intend to teach a running A Frame down the track, but I don't think I'm quite ready to take a walk on the wild side just yet.

The 'just one little thing' saga now seems to have taken up residence in Excellent Jumping.  We had some lovely runs over the weekend in jumping but just couldn't seem to manage a pass.  But very happy with her startlines, serpentines and response to my cues when I actually got to the right position, which sadly didn't quite happen as often as it should.  My favourite run for the weekend was probably the most difficult jumping course of them all, where we managed to get a fairly difficult lead out pivot into the tunnel, pulled off a fairly difficult diagonal line front cross, followed by a tight tunnel discrimination and by then I was on such a high that I totally forgot the course and just made up my own - but tragically I had made up quite a bit of it before I realised it wasn't right and the judge yelling out 'go straight ahead' brought me back to reality.  Well it felt right to me and obviously felt right to Ivy too as she was having a ball running my course instead of the judge's one which we both felt was far superior, LOL.

Just a couple more trials to go before the 2011 season is done and dusted and we look forward to them both as well as tackling the 'training list' over January and February.  Bring it on !

Getting Connected

We've had a month off trialling over September, which is something that I do with all my dogs every year.  With the amount of trials cancelled this year and the small number that we've entered, I probably didn't really need to do it, but I'm a creature of habit in regard to what trials I like to run.  Plus Ivy and I are still feeling our way as a team which is to be expected.  

As a quick summary, Excellent Jumping is very much all over the place, largely due to me either getting where I need to be or, well ........ not. (Sorry Ives)  We either have a brilliant run or it's a total train wreck - there doesn't seem to be too much in between at the moment.  Novice Agility is usually a pretty good run, with the curse of just 'one little thing' still plaguing us. Lovely run for 1st place at Hastings at our last trial with just one bar down.   It feels as if we are going for the record of the most 1st places in Novice Agility ever without actually qualifying, LOL.  Patience, we will get there when we get there and I am in no hurry.

 It was good to take the month off  to look carefully at our runs and then to pinpoint what we need to work on- sometimes if I keep entering trials it all starts to blur into one which I don't want to happen.  The lessons from our mistakes are the most valuable ones and I want to act on them, not just ignore them because I don't  have time and then find I keep on making the same mistakes over and over. 

Plus it gives me time to get some updated photos of Miss Feral - beautiful as ever, in my eyes anyway.  Oops - photo overload ahead.   Warning !

One day we might get a photo where her mouth is closed, but that day hasn't happened yet ! 

Taking time off has also meant that I can lock myself away inside over the holidays, be lazy, read a book, make some more tug toys and enjoy listening to the rain ........ with 4 wet dogs. Today is good as there have been brief periods of sunshine where they actually got to have a walk.  (Although I suspect it won't be 'today' any longer by the time I actually get around to finishing this post. ) Yesterday was scary with torrential rain, defeaning thunder and the sky lit up with lightning for a few hours. One almost deaf Cattledog who really didn't notice, one Border Collie who couldn't give a toss and two Kelpies both trying to sit on my knee. I usually don't mind storms but it was a bit freaky at times.   The Royal Show was closed down for the afternoon and I don't think that has ever happened before.

In regard to agility, I signed up to do Daisy Peel's Mental Management and Goal Setting course online - this is definitely an area I want to learn more about.  So far it hasn't disappointed and it's really forcing me to move outside my comfort zone and think about training and competing in different ways.

One of the exercises that we did related to startlines - when we had our 'twisting episodes' earlier this year, I thought a lot about the criteria I wanted for Ivy's startline and even developed a POA for how I could deal with the sideways movement I was getting.  Although we have made excellent progress in training through this issue and I am pretty happy with her startline in general, I have never really given much thought to what I actually do when I enter the ring, set her up, and then leave her.

Most of us work pretty hard to get connected with our dogs before we go into the ring, but how do we keep connected once we set them up at the startline and walk off?  What about actually entering the ring and getting to the set up point?  I have to admit I am jealous of the set up in the US where it is permissable to take your lead off and throw it on the ground, rather than have a person come and hover over you waiting for your lead.  Although I don't think Ivy even notices, there are some dogs that are put off by this - my kelpies included- and it would be nice if it was one part of the startline procedure that didn't have to happen.  Then we have this ridiculously formal procedure where we have to wait for the judge to ask if we are ready, indicate we are and from this point on you cannot touch your dog.  Then most of us do the 'sit-stay-march away' thing without looking at our dogs - so in between getting connected with your dog outside the ring to leading out and turning back to our dog ......... are we still connected to the same degree or has the startline procedure killed all the work we've done outside the ring?  Something I will be thinking about over the next few trials and experimenting with a couple of different things.  My goals for October - apart from staying connected on the startline - are testing out all the things we've been working on over the past few weeks -  to trust our training, to get to where I need to be, to give information to Ivy on time and to run like hell ! 
Wish us luck.

Girl's Road Trip

Holidays from work plus lots of agility trials cancelled in Victoria due to ground conditions equals the perfect opportunity to go on an interstate trip.  So a couple of weeks back I left the hubby and the boy dogs behind (much to the dog's disgust, although I suspect L. likes the peace and quiet sometimes) and headed off to South Australia to meet up with a friend from agility and her two girl dogs.  So now we have girls' big weekend away and we all had such a good time that we intend to do it again at some stage in the near future.



The motel where we stayed - very nice digs !

 One thing that I loved about South Australia is how much more dog friendly it is compared to Victoria.  We stayed at a motel in Glenelg, right on the beach, and for an extra fee, the dogs were allowed to sleep inside.  That's what I call dog friendly, not some place that advertises itself as dog friendly and then doesn't allow dogs to come inside and there are a ton of those around. 



We had our own little unit with the courtyard you can see on the side.



View from the motel, which was right opposite the marina.



The beach was just down the road - literally.  Our dogs had a great time running on the beach together and we got lots of long walks in as well.



Ivy waits not so patiently for the ball.



Ivy's buddy Zee who puts up with Ivy's pushy behaviour - sorry Zee !

The beach had the strangest foam I have ever seen - it resembled snowballs, or at least balls of suds from a giant washing machine.  Very weird !   I don't think the dogs could quite figure them out.

As well as having a great time at the beach, the girls also had a great time trialling - lovely courses all day which was very refreshing after some of the crap we get here.  We both came away with passes - and some oh so close runs too.  Ivy finally managed to crack the Novice agility ring with a pass in 1st place, and we  got our first pass in Excellent jumping, also finishing in 1st place.

 We managed to follow that up with another pass and 1st place in Excellent jumping back in Melbourne the following week - and a lovely Novice agility run where we were clear right up until the end, a fast run home with obstacles in a straight line and she moved well ahead of me when told to 'go on' - then pulled up after the broad and ran to her lead, which would have been fine apart from the small sized (just legal) lollypop tyre that was the last obstacle that she didn't even look at.  (Yes, we do get a lot of courses here with the broad jump as the last obstacle - LOL)
So yet another 'one little thing' agility run - but we will iron those little things out sooner or later and are still having a lot of fun in the meantime.

And a big thumbs up for our SA agility experience and hopefully another one to come soon.  Girl's road trip rocks according to Ivy.  Long walks on the beach, chasing balls on the beach, lunch at outdoor cafes, shopping strip walks, pigs ears, good friends to play with and of course agility .....what more could a girl want?

Expectations Kill

Not my words but a quote from Silvia Trkman which I happen to most definitely agree with.  So why do we often talk about our expectations on our agility journeys ?  We have high expectations, lower our expectations, meet our expectations, exceed our expectations, live up to expectations and may even have great expectations at times.   And why is it so hard to find a balance in what we expect?  If our expectations are too high then it's a one way ticket on the disappointment express eventually but if they are not high enough then it becomes easy to accept sub standard performances as the norm and not bother too much about improving these. Why is it so hard to find the balance at times?

It seems to me that often it is all to easy to confuse expectations with goals or is there just such a fine line between the two that it is easy to think of them as the same thing if you are not careful.

So far in our training and trialling, I try very hard not to confuse the two, focus on performance goals rather than outcome goals, and see the big picture of where I would like us to be as a team in a few years time.  But every now and then those expectations come back to haunt me and make me lose sight of what I think is important right now and I don't like it one bit.



Take Novice Agility for example.  I would have to say that Ivy is pretty much where I would like her to be at this stage on our journey.  Even though we have a long way to go, I am happy with the work we are doing and have definite ideas about what we need to improve on to form the basis of our training over the next few months.  Plus I can see improvement from a few months back.  But we cannot seem to crack it for a pass in Novice Agility which in the big scheme of things is not all that important at this stage - she has only been running agility for a couple of months - but all my other dogs raced through Novice agility so quickly that I guess I have been fooled into unconsciously having 'expectations' that we will do the same.   

We had a first place at the Scottish Breeds trial last month but it wasn't a qualifying score.  She does look very cute with her tartan rosette though.



Thanks to Sal Robinson for the photo
  

For some reason Novice Agility has seen one little thing each time, and always something different to boot.  On her first couple of runs, she decided that unfamiliar dogwalks were to be avoided at all costs, completing everything else beautifully.  Then she got over that, but we had a couple of 'just one bar' runs.

Then she suddenly started twisting sideways on her startline to watch me walk out, subsequently running past the first obstacle on release, but of course completing the rest of the course perfectly.  After developing an action plan for her startline, changing a couple of things, and pulling her from trialling for a couple of weeks to work on it, she hasn't had a reoccurrence of that behaviour, but then on to Scottish Breeds and the weave pole entry from hell that threw many Masters dogs and got left in for the Novice course.  Ivy's entries are pretty good and I actually expected her to make this one (those expectations again) but we did not and scored a fault there. 

The good thing about missing an entry is that it motivates me to keep proofing way more difficult entries and not just be satisfied with what I have.  The bad thing about it is - on to the following week's country trial with the same judge for Novice agility and lo and behold - he puts down the same course again, with a little bit of 'tweaking of angles' that actually made the course a bit more difficult. 

I handled the weaves differently this time and actually got the entry - but then she popped out when I yelled 'yes' as she went in, LOL.  One more thing to add to my list of weave proofing.

So here we currently are, Q-less in Novice Agility and while I really don't care about this and would honestly prefer to put the runs on the board for a bit before moving up, I still have to remind myself to stay focussed on what is actually important in our training at this stage - and the almighty Novice agility Q is really not.

I want to spend the next couple of months revisiting a lot of basic skills to fine tune these - especially our double box work and contact and weave proofing - plus I want to consolidate all the training we have done on our startline by pushing her a little bit more and 'testing the value' as Susan Garrett would say.

I also want to work on the mental side of training and competing a lot more, as I know I can improve a ton there.  And I intend to start by not letting other people's expectations influence mine.  In fact I am going to take the lead from Silvia, repeat 'expectations kill' over and over again.
Anyone for the T Shirt - it would make a good agility mantra.



Ivy Hits the Wall

Not literally, but she is about to hang on the wall courtesy of this beautiful drawing that was given to us by one of L's clients and drawn by her friend. 

I think this is absolutely stunning - the photo doesn't do it justice either - and really captures her personality as well, plus it's the first time I have ever had one of my dog's photos turned into art work and is something that I think I will be doing with all of them after seeing this.  A big thank you to the artist plus L's client who arranged it - sorry I don't know your names but I hope he let you know how much we love your work and that we are very grateful for this gift.

So I thought this would be a non-agility related post for a change and I would add some of my favourite photos of Ivy instead - taken to mark her second birthday this month and mostly black and whites as I was inspired by the sketch.   You're an awesome model Ivy, sorry my amateur efforts at photography don't do you justice.