Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The Girls

My instructor, Debbie, refers to Mimi and Gracie as "the girls." Since that is modern slang for boobs, it's funny when she says it, as in "I'll see you and the girls tomorrow." But despite their deep and abiding hatred for each other, Mimi and Gracie do form a pair, odd and contentious a pairing as it may be.

There are two agility trials coming up in August, local ones in a venue that I really like and that is about 40 minutes from my house. Because doing agility helps me stay sane during the good times, I felt it was just as important during these bad times, so I entered them. Those entries represent a lot of PB&J sandwiches for dinner.

Since Gracie decided to get her AKC Novice Jumpers title at her first trial, she will be competing in Open Jumpers at her second AKC trial (only her third agility trial overall). Besides a pretty big increase in the difficulty of the courses, Gracie will now have to face all 12 weaves in Open--they only use 6 weave poles in Novice.

Mimi is a weaving fiend. She has astonishing control over her body and lately has been getting faster and faster. Her footwork in the weaves is so fast that I have to have video to pick out what she does (she slaloms like most bigger dogs do, alternating leads with each front leg). She can get a little carried away though. Last week, she was going so fast that she lost control and ran head on into one of the poles. BOING!!! Amazingly, she didn't lose her place or pop out and immediately resumed weaving at top speed.

Gracie, well, Gracie has struggled a bit with the weaves. She was mostly trained with weave-a-matics and has good footwork in the vertical poles but when she gets carried away, she'll start skipping poles. She's learned enough to know she has to exit the poles in a certain way and sometimes she'll adjust, skipping another pole or two until she is lined up correctly for the exit. When she does this, it is clear to me that she knows that there are 12 poles and that she has to do them all. (And that she can count to 12; most agility dogs can.)

Gracie was barely doing six weaves consistently at her first trial. Now she has to do all 12 and we don't get all those free attempts like we do in Novice.

As much as I dislike this particular technique, I found that if I tell her "easy!" around pole 6, and if she makes it successfully to pole 8, she can usually complete all 12. But she does slow down a bit after I say easy, mainly because she starts thinking super hard about what she's doing. Mimi probably weaves on auto-pilot now, but Gracie isn't quite there.

The Backyard Dogs exercise I set up for them had 12 poles, good practice for Gracie, plus a curved tunnel that required you to send the dog in then run around the back side and pick them up from behind it. Gracie, a green dog without many preconceived notions of what is proper, picked up on this right away. Mimi, an experienced dog who is sure she knows what is going on, really struggled with this the first few times we did it. I had to reshape the tunnel away from the original C-shape so that it would help her figure out I was BEHIND the tunnel and she was to turn away from the direction she thought was "right."

They both jump at 16", they both have the jumping style that straight-fronted terriers often have (lots of air time in high jump arcs), they both register about the same in my peripheral vision, they know the same verbal commands and start line stay routines, and I train them in the same handling system so they recognize all of those signals. In these things, they do make a pair, the girls.

But in execution, that is, running the course with them, they feel entirely different to me. Mimi handles like a bullet: compact, fast, wraps and slices nice and tight, sticks her contacts like she was glued to them. Point and shoot, off we go. Gracie is more like handling a kite: she's fast but there's some drift, and I have to cover more ground because I have to get closer to obstacles to help her commit. I can see the greatness in Gracie, though.

Consider that I didn't start any classes with her until last fall, and she's been to all of three trials so far, with considerable success. She didn't have the years of focused training that I gave to Mimi, yet look at how quickly she is taking all of this in and how proficient she is becoming.

If I were to get both girls into the excellent/masters levels, I think the girls would give us all a very entertaining and competitive show.

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