So yeah. I earn a big fat "F" this week for my complete and total failure to update this blog. Especially considering that a week ago we had a trial. Oops. Oh well, life happens. We went running on Monday, then on Tuesday I had to make treats for work, Wednesday was my birthday, Thursday I went and helped with bingo at the nursing home and last night, well, meh. lol
As you can figure, that also means we did a big fat zero in the training department this week. That includes Kizzy, which is another giant fail on my behalf. She doesn't seem to care. This morning we bumped our run up to five miles and the girls thought it was great -- Kizzy did finally keel over when we got home (see above).
As I mentioned, we had a NADAC trial in La Crosse last weekend. The whole weekend was just..... I don't know, not terribly exciting. There was nothing wrong with the courses (we had a barrel in standard for the first time and it was thankfully more "exciting" than we've seen used previously), but I was just.... bored?
Secret was a good girl, too, but I just don't think she's "feeling" NADAC anymore. She Q'd in Regular and Jumpers with nice runs each day (Jumpers on Saturday was slow because I dared to lead out), but Chances was just horrible. I'm pretty sure she hates that class -- and if she hates Chances, I'm not really sure if there is any point in continuing to make her do NADAC. She has a bazillion Q's in Regular and Jumpers and she runs happy in those classes, but she's shutting down in Chances because she doesn't find that type of handling fun. And I admit a huge part of that is because I don't work on it at home anymore to MAKE it fun. Guess I need to decide what my priorities are.
The boys mostly had little errors here and there. Both of them had big 'ol goose-eggs on Saturday (out of 3 runs for Luke and 4 for Kaiser). Sunday was better with Luke going 2/3 (no Chances) and Kaiser going 2/6, squeaking out a Q in Regular and Tunnelers. I wasn't upset or bothered by anything this weekend, but nor do weekends like that one instill boatloads of confidence going into Champs.
I didn't win the worker raffle either day (what is that, the first time in four trials?!), so I am really debating whether or not to enter the September trial. We are already entered in AKC the weekend after Labor Day and the NADAC trial is the following weekend. Then we would have one weekend off before heading to Champs. If I don't run in the NADAC trial the dogs would have two weekends off and then I don't risk the whole "having a crappy trial right before Champs" issue. I feel like I'd put a lot of pressure on myself and them, and that just wouldn't be fun for anyone. I don't know, I'll see how the AKC trial goes and see how broke I am that week I guess.
In other news, look what I did today! This is the first time the dog walk has seen the light of day since 2011, as I never actually got it out of the garage last year. The reason is twofold, as obviously Kizzy needs to learn someday and this way I can proof the dogs on some contacts and distance stuff before Champs (and okay, I should probably practice a flip from the dog walk into a tunnel now that we are doing AKC).
We played on it already, of course. Secret shocked me by showing me that she actually DOES remember to automatically target into a two-on/two-off position (something I have not seen from her since, well, probably 2011 when this was set up at home, lol). So she does remember it, but I just never actually transitioned that behavior to trials. That's nice. We'll see what we can do about that. We'll also see if we can't get Kaiser to start stopping a bit lower again, as his stop has crept up a bit on me lately (or sometimes he decides he doesn't have to stop, which we also need to work on).
Kizzy is enamored with the dog walk, as it's now thought of as the magical chicken-dispensing toy. She picked up on it very quickly. I suppose one of these days I need to figure out what behavior I'm going to teach on this thing. I'm tempted to just see what she does naturally -- if she doesn't show signs of leaping, we can try running -- but I'll be honest, I just don't have the time to put into teaching her a real running contact. I suppose I could stick a tunnel at the bottom and see how that goes (ala Kaiser's training method a couple of years ago). We'll see. I just need to get back to working with the little stinker.
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And with that we take a 12+ hour break because as I was typing the above post my power went out. Good thing for auto-save, although I'm not sure how much of the post I lost or what I was saying. Oh well. It cut out around 6:30 p.m. last night and we got power back around midnight. Thank goodness, because it was turning into an uncomfortable and not fun night -- not to mention I was starting to worry about the food in my fridge making it through!
Because there was nothing better to do, we went to bed at 8:30 last night. That meant I was pretty much wide awake at 6:00 this morning, although we drug it out and stayed in bed a bit past that. It was a good morning to be up early, though, as it's going to be hot and gross today. I took the little dogs out on a walk that ended up being just over four miles (didn't plan on that far, it just happened!) and then after breakfast I took the big dogs swimming at the river. It's about 11:00 now and we're in for the day!
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