Friday, November 18, 2011

Agility in KSA Week 5

This week I thought it might be fun to give you some idea of what is required to make this agility class a reality.

First, I want to give a gigantic thanks and thumbs-up and bow of respect to my co-instructor MH. She has thrown herself completely into this agility teaching gig . Frankly, I couldn't have made it work without her.

We have now reached the stage where we have enough gear that it takes three trips from car park to soccer field, each of us manhandling a dolly precariously stacked with awkwardly shaped loads. It is all made harder by the fact that the security gate we use to enter school grounds is about 20 feet higher in elevation than the soccer field.

It is still dark here at 5:30 in the morning. Class equipment dumped in the soccer field. Jumps are made entirely of PVC with J&J Dog metal jump cup strips attached. I put as much stuff as I can into duffels for easier transport.

But it isn't simply a matter of driving up somewhere and we are done. All of the class equipment has to be loaded into our cars the night before and unloaded each class meeting. The soccer field is about 100 yards from the car park. We are now meeting at 5:15 am to do the gear-dragging so that we have about 20 minutes for transport, 20 minutes to set up the field, leaving about 25 minutes to work our own dogs before the first participants show up at 6:30 am when class begins. And to make all of that happen, I have to get up at 3:00 am on my weekend morning. Pretty brutal.

To complicate matters, the soccer field is enclosed with a fence but it has 12 permanent openings. I made mesh panels that can be clipped over each opening to give us a practice space that is sort of secure. It takes between 3 and 4 clips per opening to attach the panels. The field is 390 feet long and 150 feet wide and the openings are distributed around the perimeter so clipping up the panels before class and taking them down afterwards is a significant time commitment.

Moving to the grassy field was the impetus for us to introduce weaves this week. We are using Susan Garrett's 2x2 method (and MH's three sets of 2x2s). Even in the first lesson, and considering that we are not training handlers or dogs who will ever see competition agility, we saw some great success.

View of the field this week. You can see MH and her PWDs and the silver mesh shade we put over our three dog crates in the background. Looks kind of like real agility, doesn't it? In fact, this photo seems pretty tame until you remember that it was taken in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia!

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