frustration

some times agility is frustrating. okay, so a lot of times agility is frustrating. especially when your dog is better than you. i have a truly amazing dog. she is mostly well trained. and she is fast, like really fast. people would kill for a dog like her. and then there is me, who mostly just fumbles around pointing at stuff.

tonite was mostly frustration, but first (to make myself feel better) lets talk about the good stuff.

We did some nice rear crosses (although they weren't technically supposed to be done with the exercise) but I was happy with how tight they were, and how I handled them. (i.e I was in the right spot, driving for the right jump standard, and wasn't pointing)

Sartlines- she didn't move or change positions once.

Contacts- her dogwalk was awesome tonite, no creeping, and only a little curling.

Gambling- we did a fun gamble tonite that required Wicca to ignore the tunnel underneath the dogwalk and instead take the far out jump. She didn't flick to the tunnel which is amazing (wicca's theory is that if the tunnel is under the contact it must be taken)

and here comes the frustration part.....

I hate being rushed. I felt rushed on the stupid double box thing. When I did it with front crosses it felt awful, my timing sucked a$$ therefore my dog had no freakin' idea where she was going. ugh. and I didn't have time to do it right, which just ticks me off. and with three feet of snow outside it's not like I can set it up in my backyard.

weave poles. my dog cannot collect for weave poles. there, I said it. She missed probably 6 entries out of 8 tonite. that is a bad average. she couldn't get it with no motion from me, and she certainly couldn't get it if I was moving. sigh. it is such a struggle with her sometimes. she is in such a hurry she will not sit back and put in the extra stride to get the entry. it drives me crazy. and because I hate weave repetitions it is a really hard thing to fix (because I don't like her to weave) The answer is to go back and do more three poles, which is much better than doing 6 over, and over, and over again. But still it makes me worry to weave her often anymore. but without training it is not going to magically fix itself.

my handling left a lot to be desired. how hard is it to do a freakin' arm change? not hard at all, unless you are me. I could not get my arm change done at the right time so my dog could switch leads and get in the poles. combine that with the fact that she wasn't even really trying to get in the poles left me feeling very frustrated tonite.

hence my rant. I just keep repeating in my head that agility is supposed to be fun. tonite was not particularily fun.

this week we have league on thursday, a fun and fast little jumpers course. I initially was only going to bring Boone, but after tonite I will be bringing Wicca aswell. We obviously need the work.

update:

so i am feeling better this morning, I have a very good dog. Mostly, it is me. :o) If I would have taught her collection when I first started training her we wouldn't have any of these problems. Wicca doesn't understand how to collect properly and when the angle is rough, or if it is an "open" entry she has a hard time getting her body to do what she wants. we will go back and work on three poles for the next while and see what we can do to fix this....