THE LETTER "J" - ZOLA AND MY 1ST DAY OUT ON A LOCAL FIELD TRAINING
I have a lot of dreams and high hopes for Zola, and with that is going to be quite a bit of skills training, drive training and focus training, and a ton of planning on my part. Where my training with Cedar has always been lacking is I have never really had a plan, I just show up for class and do whatever is going on that day and it worked out perfectly fine, Cedar ended up being a hig achiever but not an elite dog and I ended up being an average to good handler but nothing special.
So Zola and I am going on a quest to hopefully be an super duper awesome team. I know our ultimate goals will be to get into the Invitational as one of the top 5 Labradors in the country and get at least 4 MACH's. But I still need to sit down and make littler goals. Like our goal for this year is the 3 F's, Fun, Fast and Focussed. And any trial we do this year will have those 3 in mind, Q's are not going to be on our brain (well they will be, but I will have to remind myself to push those thoughts away).
So my first step of my grand scheme is to train a little by ourselves so we can practice things I want us to practice. To achieve this goal I have bought Nancy Gyes "alphabet drills", I do see it is lacking blind crosses, oh well.
Just back to my philosophy on training and trialing a bit, because there is a huge range of opinions on that topics. First off, I am fine starting a dog young as long as it is fun and the expectations are not too high ..... I learnt that after getting 1 NQ out out of 4 in obedience with Zola so far, did I ruin her like some people say, absolutely not ..... I know my dog, she is not going to get ruined by NQing, she does not even know she didn't NQ - I can ruin her by making it totally boring, and getting angry or making her do things I can see she does not want to do - but I cannot ruin her by entering anything. So as long is my dog is having fun, early is better because they learn so much quicker when they are young. That all been said there is a fine line as too what the perfect amount of training is. Got to have another little detour here, young dogs are way more adapable than older dogs, huge oppurtunity to get them to be able to perform anywhere and any time, hence another reason for trialing and doing fun matches very early ....... otherwise you have to wait until they are like 5, believe me I know, Cedar took that long, so going a whole new route with Zola.
So today was "J" - the jump pattern was in the shape of a J, we practiced arcs, rear crosses and strait aways, together with learning to single bounce jumps. Was it successful? Absolutely! Was she or me perfect, absotutely not, but we both learnt things. She learnt a rear cross on a jump and a single bounce stride to the next jump. I learnt she will tug as a treat at the end of a sequence, I also learnt, that I need a plan for treats when the grass is too high, and that I need to shorten the session a bit and maybe make it a tiny bit simpler (she did just fine, but I was worrying it was too much for her even though when I set out I thought I had a good plan).
So before my next session.
I need to have my plan more defined and I need a better venue, that place was a little too distracting even though she did very well for her age. And I need to work on my handling skills as always, because Zola I think has a ton of talent, and it is going to be me that holds her back if I don't concentrate on being better at handling.
Rene, Cedar and Zola
