01/22/2012 - Cedar AKC Trial, Zola Training

01/22/2012
Cedar and I went to the Golden Retriever Club Agility AKC Agility Trial at Simons Arena in Cannon falls today.  The weather was kinda dodgy getting there and back again because of the freezing drizzle, we survived though, but there was a little bit of white knuckly showing from me.

The results were mixed, Cedar was very blah in the stantard run, but did Q - which was good as I saw a ton of people NQ on that course despite it looking relatively easy except for the weave entry which would have been tough for really long strided dogs.

I had been lazy and did not get to the bank to get cash which I needed for food for that trial, and as a result I was very hungry by our JWW course, added to a lack of sleep from being bad and not getting to sleep on time for many days, I was very light-headed.  Add these things all together, Cedar did a great job, me not so much, I totally forgot where I was going half way though the course, which was a shame as Cedar was doing great and was actually running fast.  Bad bad me.

Cedar gave a few people a good laugh, she found a huge piece of firewood at the far side of the parking lot at Simons and then proceded to carry it all the way in, very awkard and very heavy, but she is always so proud of herself when she carries insanely large objects ..... I think that wood weighed about 10 lbs, no kidding.

Later ...... after white knuckling it home.

Had a nap despite Zola's disgust as she had been crated while I was out and she was ready to go.  Felt a bit better after that and walked around the soccer fields, and Zola looked very keen to get to any dog she could see, bummer for her, she is not going off leash until she is out of heat ..... she is potent at the moment and is acting it as well.

Figured Zola had been neglected training wise of a few days so I set my jumps up in the snow and let her do a few drills with no bars.  Nothing fancy, just 4 jumps in a curve so she could drive though them, which she did a good job doing.  And then set up the 4 jumps in a + design and practiced some direction changes.  Then took up on the teeter 3 times and called the outside exercises done.  Then we went downstairs and practiced the board on the stairs and stopping at the bottom and runninng up it, hadn't done that in a long while.

Then I took out the 2 by 2 weaves and set them up in a straight line, I only let her go though them 4 times, and other than class, once a week 4 times is going to be her limit until she is a year.  She has really picked up speed in them since class on Wednesday, it is as the action is moving from her contious to her subcontious (Lanny Basham).

More Zola training, this time obedience.  Zola will now take the dumbell from me and hold it when I ask her to.  I am very amazed at how easy this dumbell thing has been to teach.  What really got the ball rolling is me teaching her to bring things back, and that was me using the chuckit and the tennis ball and food ..... once we got the concept of bringing thing back we moved onto the dumbell which was a task in its own, I ended up having to make a huge puppy game of it and use a very high pitched puppy/baby voice to talk to her and praise her, not embarassing as I was in my basement where nobody could hear me.  But really as soon as I actually go her to pick the dumbell up (I was not worried about her spitting it out after retrieving at first).  I was getting almost perfect fetchs with her in a few days, and I think it has been a week now, and she does the force fetch without me having to open up her mouth and shove things in, plus she retrieves and holds.  I even tried a glove today, and although that was not perfect, she did sort of get the hang of it after a few tries.

That is our training and trialing for today.