Class!

Well, we decided to definitely not go to the trial on Saturday, but over the weekend mom tested my leg a little bit with a few easy jumps and weaves. I knocked a bar with my back legs on Saturday and hit the tire with my back legs on Sunday. Everything else we tried looked good. And I ran and ran in my backyard and never showed any signs of limping. Mom thinks I still put more weight on my right front leg than my left, but maybe I always do that?

Any way, today was our first class back with Jenn! She now has her own building to train in and this was our first time going there and seeing it. Very cool! We haven't had class Feb. 22 so it was awesome to be there! Today's class focused on rear crosses on the flat and at a jump and front crosses on the flat and at a jump. The first thing we had to do was jump, jump, rear cross on the flat, turn to left, jump, aframe. Mom took off way too fast and got to the cross position ahead of me so, of course, I couldn't do a nice rear cross! I needed to be out front! So we tried again and mom did a little better with her timing and we managed a slightly uncomfortable rear on the flat. But then I flew up and over the aframe (while mom held her breath and hoped that I wouldn't struggle or show signs of limping or anything)! Then we tried the same thing but with a rear cross before the second jump and that was much easier and felt much better. We also practiced the rear crosses on a couple other jumps with me being on mom's right side.

After that we practiced a recall to rear cross on the flat which was confusing for mom but she finally figured it out (I think).

Then we tried some exercises with front crosses on the flat - which we thought were a lot easier - and front crosses at the jump. We had to do aframe and then a jump off to the right and then mom had to move far enough ahead and out to do a front on the flat and line me up for two more jumps. This went pretty well - mom has done these before and didn't realize that's what they are called. Next we did it where I did the aframe and mom did a parallel send to the jump on the right and then ran down and front crossed before the third jump. Well, I was so fast that mom didn't have time to get the cross in! WooHoo for me!!!!!! She had to try again and trust my send more and get into position faster. It worked the second time.

Finally we ran a little longer sequence that included the dogwalk (no problem) and weaves. Overall, class went really well and no one saw anything weird about the way I was moving or anything. And I was very happy to be doing agility!

Some things to think about - crosses on the flat are used only between obstacles (they don't involve any obstacles), they can be very helpful for young dogs who don't know how to "send" yet or who require more motion from the handler to keep up their momentum, the front on the flat we did today was used with extension, front at the jump cued collection (don't know if this is a rule but we want to remember this point and think more about it), motion cues the rear at a jump, and mom should trust my sends more. That's all we can remember right now!

Here is a really quick video we made mostly to show the recall rear cross. The actual rear crosses aren't very good - mom didn't think it through enough to be able to really show the difference between rear at the jump (she should've moved laterally behind the first jump) and the rear on the flat.

(As always we are writing all of this down so we can have a chance of remembering it all and we know these long descriptions can be boring so please don't feel bad if you don't want to read it all!)

Gotta zoom!

Ricky