Agility Evening

We started the day with a nice 4 mile walk.  Both of us had a fun time.  I dropped chunks of bread behind me on the walk out and Gimme had fun finding them on the way back.  I did it just as a fun diversion for her, but it seemed to have the added advantage of getting her nose down.  We'll see how/if that carries over for nosework class tomorrow.

My day was hectic and I was running late leaving for class - caused by the inventory folk.  I was fretting and wondering if I'd make it anywhere near to time.  There were also traffic snafu's and I was kinda agitated.  I'm not sure if that affected Gimme; I'm sure it didn't help.  As it turned out we were only 15 minutes late for a 90 minute class.

I'd brought an expen so we would have a nice safe space to do some work having Gimme  watch the other dogs/teams and learn to stay in her right mind.  I didn't have time to set them up before we needed to come in.  Blynn has given me space to store it with the agility equipment, so it'll be there and available whenever I want to use it.

As we came in, I got her started settling down in the space where we usually do our mental connecting/focus work, but then the person before us went waaaaay over the top loudly celebrating with her dog and that really seemed to bug the heck out of Gimme.  So we spent our first turn working being calm, controlled and connected.  I was soooooo glad that I remembered what I'd learned from our last class about being clear on where Gimme is in her agility learning and keeping the training and challenges realistic for where she is, as well as very rewarding.  So, we got to some real nice moments at the end of that turn.

Gimme was trying when we came in for our second turn, but she was still clearly very wired. I can only imagine what it would have been like if we hadn't gotten the walk earlier.  Again we got to some really nice sequences, about mid way through that turn and through to the end.

Even as far off as we were from what I hoped to be working on tonight, its clear that Gimme is really learning to love this game, and man-oh-man, is she ever going to be fast.  There was one straightaway sequence of three jumps coming out of a tunnel, which forced me to really race to be in position for the last jump.  Even with the ability to get well ahead while she was in the tunnel, this kid had no problem catching and passing me.  Running that fast felt so unnatural, it seemed like I should have body parts flinging off me.