Saturday, December 13, 2008

Ive had a break through!

So I finally got around to practicing with Miley this afternoon. My yard is still pretty wet but I thought we could do a little bit. I set up the weave poles to work on the entrance stuff that "m" told me about. The one with the two jumps then the weaves. Well she just kept skipping the last pole. I couldn't figure out what the problem was. And I finally saw it. I actually saw her looking ahead to the next obstacle which was a jump and pulling her out of the poles. I can never see anything I'm doing wrong. I can watch all my video and such but I cant really see what I'm doing or the dog is doing that is causing the problem. But this time I did see it. I'm so excited. I had a jump pretty close to the last pole that wasn't part of the exercise. It was probably 3 feet from the last pole. I was treating her , or trying to if she did it right, at the end of the poles. So I wasn't thinking about the jump. Then I saw her head come up and looking at the jump when in the 4-5th pole. And it hit me. She is already looking for the next obstacle. Once I move the jump just a little bit back, she stayed in the poles without a problem. My next problem is still the 2o/2o. I can back chain and back chain and she gets the 2o/2o. But once I have her run the whole dogwalk she goes to the end of the board and stops but doesn't touch the ground. The only thing I can think of it that I did so many running contacts that it is still somewhat in her head. So when she is running the whole board she is still not sure of what I want. So more reps of that to do. I didn't really work on anything else.

3 comments:

Chris and Ricky said...

Congratulations on your break through! Hopefully that will solve the weave pole problem!

Dawn said...

Glad you got it figured out. I'm sure you will figure out the 20/20 soon as well!

Sara said...

Sounds like you had an "aha moment! That's great!

Love your new header photo of all four dogs. They look so cute together.