This Sunday a club I'm in, West LA OTC, put on an agility practice for members. One person designs a course and plays judge. I found the course was rather difficult because it was hard for me to memorize. She had taken a course and modified it a bit to include elements she knew members had covered in the club's classes. A novice and excellent course were nested. Unfortunately the parks department had double booked the field and we had to scrunch up the course. Our "judge," Debbie, said it hadn't been so hard when set up in the proper space, but we had to scrunch it up a bit.

I ran Night three times and Treena twice over the course of our practice. I did the excellent course with Night and our first go was pretty good, nice and clean. I had planned on trying to tighten the lines our second go, but had difficulty remembering the middle of the course. I'm pleased that I was able to figure out how to tighten the lines in the parts we did correctly. For Night's third go I just made up my own course in such a way that it would be pretty much a fun fast circle. Also, during each run I gave Night treats for the contacts.

I ran Treena on the novice course first. She did great. Held all her contacts and got treats on the contacts. The second time I ran the excellent course with her, breaking it up into doable segments and giving her treats for contacts, front crosses, the table like in class.

Now, what I learned. We hadn't had A frame to tunnel under the A frame in a long time and I, at first, had very apparently forgotten how to handle that correctly with Night. Fortunately I, after a couple mistakes, remembered what I was supposed to do - a front cross maneuver and not a flip into the tunnel. With Treena, I needed to remember to go into the pocket for serpentines. While practicing her on some jumps and weaves that had also been set up, I see a problem with our directionals. When running beside me I told her right to turn to the weaves, but she spun in a right circle like she does when we practice left and right away from obstacles. I'll have to find a way to retrain that. I'm thinking of using a throw toy. I think she will learn not to turn in circles anymore that way. She doesn't turn in a complete circle if the next obstacle is easily visible.

I also nowhere near have a handle on running a dog so much faster than me as Night runs fairly close rather than ahead of me. I hope I don't muck it up and end up teaching Treena to slow down to my brain speed.

Being able to run a course away from class with Treena is helpful. Gives me more insight into where my weakness and her training weakness are and how much father we have to go before I will be to run in a trial with her and be happy - be happy with me - Treena can do no wrong.