Tuesday Training 28

We had an great and productive lesson with Marisa yesterday.


This was the bulk of our work. In the black sequence, Marge had to "go out," and in the white sequence, she had to come in to my hand. We handled the go outs much, much better than the come ins, but the handling did start to click towards the end.

We also did some work on front crosses. I am very, very late with my fronts, and that problem is exacerbated by the fact that Marge's stride over the jump is pretty big and she isn't reading the fronts that well yet. To counter this, Marisa put a gate alongside one of the jumps so that Marge had to adjust herself as I front crossed.

We're going to have another lesson next week. I think we're going to put out more standard course equipment and less jumps. It's been a couple of weeks since Marge has seen contact equipment.

We're roughly a month away from the trial now. The plan is to keep training with Marisa privately, and drop into class one or two times. I might have the opportunity to go back out to train in New Jersey, but I'm not holding my breath.

Our first APDT Rally trial of the year will be on April 24 and/or 25, indoors at my club's training building. It will be a small trial, probably less than 100 entries per day, and Level 1 (Marge's class) will most likely run first. I'm unsure if I want to do both days with her. I probably will send in my entry for both, and then play it by ear the weekend of the trial. To prepare for that, I'm going to keep training with my friend and her Westie on AKC courses, and also train privately a couple of times to run APDT style courses, too. After that, we'll possibly have another Rally trial in July. By then, I'd like to be ready to run her in Level 2 - we're starting to work on the exercises now for that class.

I'm sorry I've neglected the blog this week. My absence will probably continue for another couple of days, or maybe until the weekend. For a couple of reasons, I am physically and emotionally tired.