This week brought Zola's first birthday. To celebrate Kurt and I did a run walk around Lake Calhoun with her and made tuna treats which she loved that day and all the training classes which followed that week.
Zola also officially started jumping 20" this week, early for her age but her growth plates are closed which is what I suspected as she did go into heat early, so I was expecting her to be done growing early. Mentally she is still a puppy and gets up to puppy stuff, though she does still have great focus for work. I also measured her and she is still at 22" even at the shoulders - so measuring for when she starts competition later this year is going to be interesting.
We had 2 classes and 1 at home session by ourselves.
First up was "On the Run" on Wednesday, she did very well and I was fairly shocked at the level of difficulty of the course especially since we have really only just started stringing things together. She did a really good job and I do notice with her she pushes a fairly well, and I didn't really teach that ........ weird, but I will take it. We also got to work on a tire, jump, and then tunnel entry - but not the entry right in front of the dogs nose after they take the jump - that took me about 15 tries to figure out how to handle it. I have a feeling, I am the one that needs to learn the most here - handling a faster dog (and she is not even border collie fast) is a whole lot harder. We worked solidly for an hour that day, with tiny breaks in-between, and she just kept on going - and then we hung out at Kurts house for several more hours and she kept on being super active - she sure has a very long lasting battery on her. So used to Cedar, who you do a little bit of exercise with and she is nice and relaxed and mellow for the night.
Next up "Cloud 9" on Thursday, I was expecting the class to be 6-7 dogs, but it ended up being 8/9. But actually was really nice, which is the good thing about hanging with the more experienced dogs and handlers, things just flow a whole lot faster. I did learn some handling skills on what not to do in general and what not to do with Zola (aka, she is too fast to pull off some of the moves I have for Cedar). First course I handled badly so we didn't look that good, but 2nd course I thought we looked fairly good. And the highlight of the day was I don't think she off-coursed once to the ramp - yip, the ramp is a fav for her.
And then yesterday we worked on the letter C from the Alphabet book. Just some general 5 jump work, sharp turns, front and rear crosses and some driving forward. I did throw in a few blind crosses even though they are not in the book. I will have to find some kind of course maps with some good examples of blind-crosses for us to follow. We didn't do the whole of the C pattern because I wanted to keep the session short and I did feel a whole lot better about me not having her out there too long practicing. I am happy about the new spot for doing this at home training, it is the field at the end of my road with the high-school parking lot next to it, so as long as I get there early on a Saturday or Sunday morning, training will work out perfectly, no people, it is cool, and I can drive right up to where I need to offload my jumps.
That is this weeks training done. Now off for our Sunday morning walk as both Cedar and Zola are getting pesky.
