This weekend Steve over at AgilityNerd.com came up with a fun set of exercises using the basic set-up of the octagon course that I ran last week. Steve's courses had a fun level of difficulty and looked like a nice challenge. Not only that, but Steve asked for people to take video of our attempts and he would post them all on his blog. I don't know how many people will step up and do it, but you know I'll never turn down a chance to make another training video! :o)
There were six different patterns to choose from with various levels of difficulty. Steve thought that two and three were the most difficult and I suppose they were. They all looked like fun, though, and it was hard to choose. In the end I settled on the second exercise and decided to focus all of my efforts on learning and running this one course well instead of trying to do multiple drills in one night.
By far the trickiest part of this drill was getting from 9 to 10 without taking the off course jump!! Apparently my brain also had trouble remember which side I was supposed to take at number four, as I totally didn't even realize I cued the wrong side to Secret when we ran with blind crosses.
We ran with front crosses first. Both Secret & Kaiser went off to the off course jump between 9 and 10, no surprise there! Secret's off course was totally my fault because I completely failed to give any deceleration cues. Aside from that everything went pretty smoothly. Kaiser did totally crash jump number eight on one of his first turns. I mean, he TOTALLY crashed it. That would be why he appears rather hesitant in the beginning portion of the video (I didn't include that run), but thankfully he seemed to work through it and ended well. He hasn't done that at home for a while, so I was kind of bummed about it.
I made myself run the drill using entirely rear crosses for each dog, too. Wow, I obviously don't do enough of this type of thing with Secret. She ran well, but she was constantly checking in with me for direction. You can tell she's gotten used to me staying in front of her and prefers me to stay there.
Kaiser has been so quirky about rear crosses at trials lately, but he did surprisingly well. It didn't shock me when he took the off course at 9/10 again.
We were getting pretty cooked, but I went for a run using all blind crosses as well (except from 11 to 12, as blind crosses cue extension and you obviously need collection for that turn!). Secret is so good at blinds and seems to like them. I thought for sure I'd lose Kaiser, but the little bugger held it together quite well!
I included Luke's ONE clean effort at the end of the video. lol Poor big guy, he tries so hard.
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