One of the things I teach is perfect timing. I know that sounds like a stretch… but it’s true. The key to understanding timing is to understand that it has nothing whatever to do with time. Timing is all about events; where things are in space. You’ll note that most errors that fast dog handlers make are for committing too soon to their movements. Isn’t that ironic? It’s a basic panic convention. They see that dog coming up fast on them and they panic and consequently don’t allow everything to come into an alignment that would allow them to be successful.

Student Brags

I got an email message from a couple of my students who travel over 100 miles to come down and train with me to brag on a day of trailing in which they both ran four times and qualified four times. They shared with me a link to a couple of runs.

A video of Reuben/Coonhound:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbyFmm-Gf2c

A video of Sylvia/Sheltie:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lg72tdnwvo

Not to take anything away from Sylvia, a very nice little dog… but isn’t Rueben about the best running Coonhound you ever saw?

Déjà vu

In the movie the Matrix we learn that Déjà vu is when they make some kind of change in the Matrix. You’ll note that Eric tweaked some little thing relative to the character set on Agility Vision. The net effect is that all of my web log entries forever have been passed through a filter that converted every apostrophe and quote marks into some funky series of characters. I went back to change a few of them… and immediately found the work too tedious. So, you’ll have to trust me that’s not how I posted any of the entries.

Déjà vu isn’t exactly right… is it. I believe this is what is called Jamais vu, or possibly Presque vu (and I don’t know how to spell either of them). The phrase I’m looking for actually means “Never seen before”.

Perfect Timing

It’s a nice change to give the dogs the corner of the box. This sequence basically represents a mirror image flip in which the handler gets to practice the same skill on either side of his body.

There might be a couple ways to solve this sequence (at least). For example, the traditional (and somewhat lazy) fast dog handler would look to make minimal work of it: hold the dog on right through the first four obstacles into a Back Cross at jump #5; and then do basically the same thing going the opposite direction.

We get so much teaching from people with fast high-drive dogs that they would lull the rest of us into the notion that we should handle our dogs as they handler their own… as though their handling is what makes them successful. Indeed, the handling plan I’ve just described is for a very fast, self-motivated, and completely obstacle focused dog (gee, I wonder if any of those things is what makes the “handler” successful?)

Plan B: A more determined plan, for just about any other kind of dog would be to pull through the (ostensibly) 270º turn (from #3 to #4 and #8 to #9) into a Front Cross to position the handler on the side of the turn to come.

Note that in this slow-dog handling plan the handlers understanding of the corner of the approach back into the box is a matter of canny timing. The handler must know exactly where the corner is and should realize that his own turning movement is what sells the turn to the dog.

The Evil Blind Cross

Here’s a sequence that provides a marvelous opportunity to practice a Blind Cross. There’s almost no dog too fast and no handler to slow to be able to conduct themselves to Blind Crosses in the transition from pipe tunnel to the corner of the box.