Post date: Mar 1, 2009 9:03:57 PM
Yesterday Trevor and I went to the Mt. Diablo trial in Dixon. February is a quiet agility month around here, so the first Dixon trial in March signifies the start of the new season.
Some things were different this year. Trevor was doing AKC agility in Dixon for the first time. And Touki wasn't with us.
I'll be honest. Running Touki in agility has never been easy. When we first started in agility class, she was so busy eating wood chips that I couldn't even get her to look at the equipment. I'm not talking about the first class. I'm talking about the first few months.
She's never had toy drive. I have a museum of pristine tug toys to prove it, with nary a thread out of place. She's low energy and given to strange phobias. Thanks to my inexperience as a handler and her poor eyesight, nerves, and unforgiving jumping style, we spent our first two years of agility knocking bars.
On our best days, we're slow. We've gotten double digit MACH points on a single run so few times that I remember each instance. She is given to sniffing. She hates the heat. A table "down" adds several seconds to our time, because she just doesn't want to.
And yet. Once she stopped knocking bars, she blossomed into an amazingly reliable, consistent dog. Suddenly we COULD Q in AKC agility. From the end of 2006 through 2008, she was a double-Qing machine. Watching her run, you were left with two impressions: this was a dog that could definitely get her MACH if she just kept at it long enough, and there had to be a way to speed her up.
There had to be a way to speed her up. There just had to be. There was so much low-hanging fruit. That slow table down, for instance. The dogwalk, where we strolled together at a snail's pace. Her slow, cagey startline. So many opportunites. Just pick one or two of them to work on, and the points would start rolling in.
It did seem that way. But training her was like trying to flatten out a lumpy mattress. When you pushed the lump down in one place, it just popped up somewhere else. One of the last things we were working on was trying to speed up her table down. I was treating it as a fun game. She seemed to be enjoying it... at least until the day she started refusing the table in competition. Coincidence? I'll never know. But that's how it was with her. If you focused on anything too hard you risked infusing it with bad mojo, and then you were doomed.
I've been on the verge of retiring Touki ever since she finished her MXJ at the end of 2006 (she finished her MX the year before). But she seemed to be enjoying agility, so we kept going. Until recently, when she started refusing the table, dogwalk, and A-Frame.
Last year at the Mt. Diablo trial, Touki QQed both days and got the double-digit MACH points that are so rare for us. This year, I only brought Trevor, even though Touki was entered. It seemed futile to bring her, especially since 20" ran late in the day (i.e., I'd have to hang around a lot longer if I ran her). I couldn't run her in Std because of her contact refusals, and we never get many points in jumpers. It's not like we were trying to get our MACH anymore.
But when I got to Dixon, I suddenly had tears in my eyes. I missed my little girl. I didn't care that we were mediocre and that we were never going to get our MACH. I didn't care that a good day for us is not being in last place out of all the 20" dogs that Qed. I missed her. I found myself fighting back tears all day. Next time she's going to come with us, and we're going to do our jumpers run, by goD. I'm not ready to let go.
It was Trevor's first time back in competition in 6 weeks, not counting his single jumpers run on the last day of January. Because of his broken toenail, we've been taking it very easy in practice and class. I've been jumping him low, and I didn't put him back on the A-Frame until last week. On top of everything, he's been sick (normal doggie gastro issues).
So anyway, we were pretty rusty going into the trial. We were not alone--overall, the Q rate was really low, and most of the teams looked a little out of sync.
On JWW, Trevor had a nice run, but there were a bunch of people and dogs hanging out by the edge of the ring in a key section. He stopped to look at them, and we got called for a refusal. Overall, he's improving in his ability to ignore people and dogs in working situations, but we still have a ways to go. This run felt a little disjointed and disconnected, so it didn't come as a complete shock that things broke down.
In Std I was just holding my breath that he would do his contacts, considering how long it's been. I was thrilled with how he did, especially on the A-Frame. Doing the "pounce" work in his PVC box (Rachel running AF system) has made a big difference. One other training note: I've started consistently using his targets in DW/teeter practice, because he seems to like the reassurance of having the criteria continually reinforced. On Saturday, I felt like I saw the benefit of doing that. He was confident and doing a better job of driving to the end, especially on the DW.
But meanwhile, I was so obsessed with getting him through the sequence between the dogwalk and the chute that I failed to realize the course's biggest challenge: the weave entry. I didn't do a very good job of cueing it, and I pulled him off before he even saw it. Plus it was the infamous invisible pink weaves. Even dogs that got the entry were popping out all over the place.
We stayed for FAST, and even though it seemed doable, we NQed. Basically, we have non-existent distance skills, because the way I taught Touki her distance skills is contrary to Moe's handling system. I'm going to have to figure something out, though. Directionals?
The upshot was that even though we didn't Q in anything and we were a little out of sync and sloppy, I was very happy with how Trevor did. His contacts are steadily improving, he's looking around less, and I feel like we're coming together as a team.
We didn't go back on Sunday because it was pouring rain.