Secret's Journey

The super crappy quality photos today are courtesy of the photo feature on my video camera.  I never thought it took such bad pictures, but I guess I usually just use it to take pictures of course maps.

But why was the video camera out?  Because we actually.... Get this.... TRAINED!!!  Go figure!  It feels like forever since we did anything agility related.  The heat finally broke -- well, if you consider 90 degrees a break from 110 (our actual high was like 103, but the humidity pushed the RealFeel higher each day).

Seeing as we have a NADAC trial coming up in a couple of weeks (that I still need to enter), I thought it would be a good idea to revisit some distance/Chances skills.  I decided to piece together a couple of different courses that I've seen posted/ran on YouTube recently and created this little gem that you see below:

 Yes, I'll pause for a moment while you reflect on the awesomeness of my Paint skills once again.

Namely we are filled with switches.  I added that bonus hoop out there past number three as a bit of a turn-away challenge and it provided a greater level of difficulty than I anticipated!  Secret sucked right to it at least twice, clear evidence that my cues were late.

The 180 turn from 9 to 10 seemed like it presented quite a challenge to several teams at a recent trial, so I wanted to test it out for ourselves.  Timing was critical, no doubt, to get the turn before the dog(s) ran through the finish hoop.  I'm happy to say that I did not experience the issue that apparently many teams had with the dog cutting in between 10 and 11.

Luke did so well (not surprisingly) that we quickly blasted through the original course, so I ran him through it the other way.  It ran well, so I brought Secret & Kaiser back out for another go at it in the new direction.

It was still around 86 degrees out and Secret was kind of "meh" about having a second go at it (by the way, I am very happy with how eager & zippy she was in her first turn!).  She put on her big girl pants and played along, though.  The soft turn from the new 8 to 9 was interesting for Secret.  Granted, I was late and there was a tunnel in front of her...  She got it the second time!

Secret's video:



Kaiser's treats were still sitting on the chair and Secret discovered them as I was lowering the jumps back down to 8" for Kaiser.  I thought that was a good opportunity to have her play with food around, but apparently her "sex toy" doesn't rank above Bil-Jac treats.  So I sat on the chair and attempted to shape her to bring me her toy.  She would pick it up and carry it a few inches before dropping it and would eventually get it to me, so it's a start.  It's hard to pick up a toy when you are standing on it, though, Secret....

We walked a few feet away from the treats and I did get her to happily play with me, so that's great!  We can play around food, just apparently not when it's a foot away.

And now that the boys' video finally finished loading, I can share that, too.   :o)