It's summertime, and I'm not teaching agility classes. But agility training and trialing don't stop just because I'm not teaching.
My goal this summer is to step up Frankie's training with a focus on more elite skills. I want to help her be more successful in the competition ring. I could of course have not said a word to anyone and trained all summer on my own. I get up very early even on weekend mornings, and there's no doubt that I could have come and gone at the club's training field before anybody else showed up. But I like training with others--my social world is tied up in agility.
I invited some of my students to join me on weekend mornings at the club for informal training on weekend mornings for the next couple of months. These students are the most successful teams in my classes because they invest at least a little bit of time in training and are making great progress with their dogs. Plus I like them and their dogs.
Last summer, I got pressured into inviting people to join a training group whom I don't like personally and whom I don't respect all that much as agility handlers. So judge away, but I don't want to spend my limited personal time doing agility with people like that. I preempted that this summer by selecting the people I want to train with. Does that make it a class? No, because others can drop in and join us if they want. I don't turn people away. I'm not that much of an asshole.
Saturdays are for skills work--drills, high rate of reward, limited equipment. On Sundays, I set up a full course that gives us an opportunity to apply the skills with more equipment.
We are going hard at it. We spent nearly 3 hours yesterday on skills and another 2 hours today working on a course.
Frankie is a social dog who has never shown issues with being crated but she doesn't often relax in an agility context. By 10am this morning, she was lying on her side in her crate, head propped up on her water bowl, blinking at me. She was exhausted.
We got home and I put the dogs outside while I unloaded the car. I had a snack then we took a nap for an hour. That is the most luxurious thing I can do with my weekends--play hard, nap hard.
Frankie loves the skills work, and is soaking up all kinds of new things, but she still finds course work challenging. That's helpful for me to work through, and it helps me understand why she is performing so poorly in the ring. She will not be successful in the competition ring until she can cope with the same stresses in the practice field.
I trust my training. I know Frankie has the physical and mental ability to succeed in agility. She's struggling with stress and anxiety that are expressed as over-arousal. I'm hoping that working with her in a high pressure, high reward training program this summer will help her push past the anxiety and allow her to go into the competition ring with confidence and focus.
