What was that Sport I do?

Finally...
Today is the first day since May 19th the dogs have had some training. Being a lovely Sunday morning here I took them over to a fortunate friend's place (I say fortunate because the lucky person has her own agility equipment - full set and training ground) and trained until the dogs were slightly tired (ie still wanted to do more and more) and I was knackered. Cypher worked on his A Frame contacts and his weaving - which he was a star at by the end even with me throwing his favourite frisbee along side the weave poles as he was doing them. We still need to work him going forward to a high value reward (his frisbee on the ground at the end of the poles) and reminding him that he cannot pop out the last two poles. His A Frame is coming along nicely now that I have settled for placing his target one body length away from the bottom of the frame. He runs straight down through the colour to get his chin touching the target. He was still doing it consistently after I covered the target up so that was good although it will need alot more repetitions. And I am happy with his speed and the fact that he is not folding his front legs under him anymore - I wonder if when we first did this he wasn't quite as controlled over his body as he is now - either that or my placing the target in that spot has helped.

Raven was a wild child to start with - barking all over the place and knocking the one bar in an 18 obstacle course that was set up. However after a couple of time outs with me training Cypher instead she soon resumed some self control and was heavily rewarded for her bars up. I also went back to her contact work basics as well - target on the ground kind of stuff, lots of repetitive rewarding for the "touch" position. We did some single bar work which she has completely under control now as we did about 20 on a double oxer and 20 on a single and she didn't touch the bar once. That's alot of sausage treats! To finish the session I went to the three bar chute work Jon showed me and it didn't seem to make any difference to her no matter what distances I gave her for the bars apart or the varied heights I did, she kept them all up! This was kind of making it hard for me to teach her (because if she doesn't drop a single bar then she doesn't see the difference in the lack of rewards). So instead of leading out to just past the third bar I stood near the first bar, released her and took off running. This brought bars down a couple of times so that worked well for her to realise that there was no reward coming for the knocked bars. She quickly figured that out though and on the third try put a huge effort into going as fast as she could and still kept the bars up. We finished there with a jackpot and called it a day. I will do some more tomorrow morning (hooray for public holiday Mondays!) and then again Tuesday afternoon after work. I won't have time to do any Wednesday as I will get home from work quite late and the dirty state these two are in they will take me all Wednesday night to bath. Then we leave Thursday around 10.30am. After today's session I am starting to look forward to seeing everyone over there and to have some fun with the dogs - given our inauspicious preparation I am not expecting anything great but I do plan on having a really good time. It's going to be a laugh in the Strategic Pairs over there - Sue and I had big plans on practicing with Nifty and Raven as did Nicola and I for Sage and Cypher - we have not had a single practice together!! We shall be going into the Strat Pairs comp over there complete and utter Novices. Definitely a recipe for much laughter and chaos and mayhem on course!