It’s time for the traveling road show, on the plane tomorrow. I’ll be at Rondout Valley Animals for Adoption, Accord, NY for four days of a handler training seminar. I have a lot of fans in that part of the world many of whom come to Country Dream frequently for the camp experience. I’m always amazed that some folks can endure the same jokes over and over again. The fun thing about working with people who have done all of my foundation exercises is that we can focus on course work and strategy rather than teaching those things that I consider fundamental

I find that it’s one thing to teach a handler a skill. It’s quite another to teach them to recognize the moment for that skill on course. You’ll find that many agility enthusiasts who’ve been playing the game for ten years or more have developed a keen sense of awareness for what they need to do in the moment of a technical challenge.

Meanwhile, I need to leave a lesson plan for my own training center. Marsha has agreed to lead my advanced students. And she has requested a study of the game FAST as a local AKC trial is coming up in a couple weeks or so. It has always been our philosophy that we want to do more than teach our students how to qualify at a game, or to survive it. Our true objective is to teach them to kill it… to play for the win.

The design consideration comes from a slightly lazy disposition. As I’m preparing to get on the road I want a minimum of equipment movement because I’ll have to spend a couple hours this evening resetting the building myself.

Rates of Travel

Fundamental to games like FAST is that the handler must understand his dog’s rate of travel in order to get the best possible score in the game. What we will do, from time to time, is conduct calibration exercises so that the rate of travel for each dog can be measured. The exercise resolves into a PPS measurement… or, Paces Per Second.

So the walk-through for each sequence will actually be more about measuring the dog’s path than to plan or practicing handling strategies. However I’m certain that this will be at the back of the handler’s mind. A bobbled sequence doesn’t give much good information about the dog’s rate of travel unless the handler intends, or cannot avoid, bobbling in the same manner on the true course for which the measurement is taken.

This sequence is hurdles and tunnels only. While there is a hard-aback turn following jump #6 which might degrade the dog’s over-all speed and a bit of a technical turn in the transition from jump #12 to jump #13… for the most part the dog should be able to work at top speed.

Note that when measuring the dog’s path the handler should take a natural and even stride rather than a stretched-out stride that is forced into an unnatural gate.

Rate of Travel #2

This sequence feature all three of the contact obstacles. It’s important for the handler to understand the impact that the contact has on degrading the dog’s overall rate-of-travel. Dogs with running contacts will slow down to a letter extent than dogs that assume a 2o2o on the descent.

This final calibration sequence is disturbed only by the performance of the weave poles. They come early in the sequence. So any dog that struggles with the performance is not likely to put in a great PPS measurement overall. Note that under FAST rules if a dog bobbles the weave poles he must restart the performance from the beginning. We will make this same stipulation in training.

It is the height of folly to put one’s dog on an obstacle with which they will struggle in any game that does not require the performance of that obstacle at all.