Hi from up here in Vancouver, Canada.  You lucky Californians with your year round agility weather!  I so miss being able to practice outside right now - we have a lot of rain - surprise, surprise and my yard is like a marsh.

Well, I'm training my first BC named Phoenix, she just turned 2!  She is wonderful but we need a lot of work on learning to be a team.  She has a lot of inertia and although I've done a lot of L. Mecklinberg foundation work, it seems to all be forgotten in the heat of a run, especially where tunnels are concerned.

Anyway, unfortunately, I don't have a video camera right now - kind of hoping to get one for Christmas, so can't post any video of my practice but I am planning on setting up Lesson 1 tomorrow so I'll let you know how it goes.  "Finding the Line" is one of the things we really need work on!

BTW, I am SO proud of you and Pickle!  I can't even imagine how it must feel to run not just one good run but a whole slew of them!  It is so amazing when it all falls into place at the right time in the right place! Congrats!

 Wendy

Hi Wendy .... I have family up in the Kelona BC area!! Small world. Alicia is right we should introduce ourselves. I was so excited to finally have a video camera ("santa to self') that I jumped right in!!

I live in the central part of North Carolina on 6 acres with my husband Chris and 5 dogs. We have 4 Lakeland Terriers and 1 8 month old BC. The weather here is pretty good but we can get about 1 month in the winter when there is either a hard freeze or it is just too *d* cold to be out to long. At that time I am glad to have a basement so we can do something with the dogs! 'Work' takes up alot of time so we finally broke down and decided to get lights for the agility field. It has been a blessing. I can turn on the Halogen lights and work the dogs for 15 min or whatever, whenever it suits me.

Alicia- awesome runs with your dog at Nationals. I would never have guessed that he only had 1 eye. That is really special to have been able to help him overcome that deficit. To be consistantly so competative at 22" .... you rock! I am looking forward to learning lots more from your lessons!!!

Elizabeth

Hi,

i am one of the lucky ones who lives on the beach in sunny San Diego. I live in a town home without a yard but in exchange for paying gardener fees have access to a field with equipment to practice. I only discovered agility about 3 years ago but quickly became addicted and am having a blast with my 2 Labradors.

As a novice I met Eric and summed up enough nerve to ask him to film our runs. Watching them can be very painfully at times but it has turned out to be the best training tool we have found up to this point.. In the beginning, you could hear his comments "bad handler" in the background. Too funny!!

I complain to him a lot because since I got my baby lab he is not coming down to San Diego as much so we only get filmed if i make the trip up North.

For those of you who haven't them, Olga, Eric  and Alicia have always been warm,friendly and approachable . Pickle runs in our jump height and long before I knew who she was, I tried to watch their runs to "steal" ideas on course strategy etc.

The concept of this class is very exciting  but I have to find the time to get my camera fixed and then learn to upload the video so I am going to start the exercises and film later.

Cheers,

Jean

I'm Vici and I run a young sheltie named Tazz.  He is just over two and we are working on a lot of things.  I also have two older shelties at home that don't run any more (both have elbow dysplasia and are retired).

I am one of the lucky ones in that I am able to work in my yard most of the year, and I have friends with equipment, so practice with them as well. And yet, with all this practice, I still have so much to learn.

I'm hoping to get structured lessons to work on during the week.  I get ideas  from clean run and other agility books/videos, but having on-going video to analyze and discuss is such a good idea. I am looking forward to new ideas from these lessons.

One thing that I really enjoy is analyzing courses.  It would be interesting in the future to pick certain courses that caused alot of faults at a trial, analyze it and then set up a practice course to teach ourselves (and dogs) not to make that mistake. 

Thanks for setting this up.  I look forward to meeting everyone.

Vici

Hello from rainy Seattle......unfortunately with all the recent rain, my backyard is pretty saturated so I wont be doing any practice there for a while.  Fortunately I have access to a covered arena, but I'm not always able to move the equipment the way I want since its set up for classes, so I'll have to see how that works out.  I have 2 dogs I run in agility, Sadie who is a 7 year old English Shepherd and Quake who is a 3 year old BC.  I used to run a small dog, Tucker, but he retired about a year ago after rupturing a disc in his spine.  Quake is very similar looking to Luz, who is his uncle.   I also have Swift, a 6 month old BC.  I'm really excited about the idea of Agility Dynamite, and I do own a video camera so will be able to upload videos. Unfortunately it will probably be another 10 days or so before I'll be able to really get involved and watch all the videos, I'm the USDAA show secretary for our club and we have a trial next weekend, so I'm pretty wrapped up in that for the moment.   Once that is out of the way, I'm really looking forward to participating!  Julie

Hi from Australia   I have a nearly three year old BC who has been trialing for about 8 months. He has a couple of littermates who are in the US one I know is doing pretty well, Most I my videos will be taken from a tripod in a distance so I hope they are not too out of focus. I am one of a small band of judges her in Western Australia so I do not get to trial as much as I would like

Tom

All,

I am running my first agility dog, Doc, a gorgeous liver and white English Springer Spaniel.  He also goes by Dockers, Dr. Doodlefish, Pumkim, Fart, and Luvbug.  We live in Southern California.  We have spent the last year converting from 2o2o to running contacts, the dogwalk being much harder than the A-frame.  We are constantly tightening up my handling to shave off time around the weaves, etc. also using cleaner lines.  Right now, Olga and I are trying to perfect Doc's startline, creating a repeatable, reliable burstable start.  Loving this dance. 

Tracy and the Doc

Well in addition to running this website, I sometimes get around to training my border collie Bree.

She might even make it into the video lessons, but there is no one to run the camera so the camera stays zoomed out and stationary.

I like how everyone has pictures of their dog as an avatar, except for me! I'm thinking of changing mine to one of these.

 

Hi I'm Serena from sunny southern California and my team mates are "Joey" a 5 year old sheltie, and "Reddi" a 5 year old Aussie.  I tell people they are my "first" agility dog, as they were raised, trained and started trialing together.  We started trialing agility in July of '05, our first agility trial being the very BIG wags for wishes...  

My goal with Joey is to be able to speed up and tighten up our runs,  power steering on Reddi (heck who am I kidding, just be ABLE to ge her going the right direction would be cool <G>) ... how do you get off this ride??  I'm now also concentrating on training Joey's daughter Josie, and bringing up his grandson "JC". 

Watching Olga handle is amazing, taking her classes I've learned alot from her and my hope is to be able to improve my handling skills.

Serena and The Shantel Gang

Hello, I'm Kathy from Minnesota and I have two American Eskimos, Shasta and Kola. Shasta and I started training three years ago and have been trialing for two years and seem permanently stuck in Open so I'm looking to take our agility training to the next level.

Kathy and the Snowpups