Well done.

06:03 in

Well it has been a hectic few weeks, now it’s all beginning to calm down.

I would also like to say a MASSIVE congratulations to EVERYONE that I teach who have all had a very successful year and all attended, beaten and smashed goals! A big majority have moved up a few grades too and qualified for Olympia. Well done. I am really pleased with you all. It just shows that consistency in training and competition and positive reward whilst it may take a tiny bit longer is better and in the end it simply kicks ass!

 I have one show left - Five Rivers, which I am judging for one of the days.

So over the past few weekends Ben has had two 3^rd places in the championship final, just loosing the time over the A-Frame and sometimes the dog walk. We have qualified for the Large Olympia Stakes for the 4^th year in a row and we have also qualified for the connection final for dogs in need next year, which I’m really pleased with as I didn’t walk the course! DOHHH. Along with some decent places too, not bad for an 8 year old when there are so many young fast and very talented dogs on the scene too.

So our personal winter training has me working on improvements

Bens dog walk has started to improve over the past few weeks so I am going to maintain that criteria as I feel it’s slowed through all the quick releases needed in the finals. He is just a bit unsure.

I have decided to start teaching Ben a running A-Frame. Why? The reason behind changing and not sticking to 2on2off is simply because Ben is getting older now and I don’t want to encourage him to do this piece of equipment at speed and keep landing hard on his front therefore its more of a decision to help prolong his agility career and keep him sound. Oh and of course it should encourage him to complete this piece of equipment faster then before!  I will blog about the training when we start it. I will not start until I have no shows or if I decide to start before 5 rivers I will not do the A-Frame as I don’t want to confuse him.

It will be interesting to see how easy/hard it is to teach an old dog new tricks!

Stig!

Well Stig has been actually fantastic and has had some brilliant runs with very few poles, some runs with no poles then stupid me sends him over an extra jump! He seemed focused and awesome until we got to Gillingham then everything seemed to of vanished. I’m putting Gillingham down to a lack of training as Stig had not done anything for well over a week, nearly two as I had been so busy I think it was all just a little to exciting as he hadn’t seen equipment for a bit. Although, I did get some nice pieces on the Sunday. I’m looking forward to next year with him. He is eager and loves it.