Contacts and Weaves

Lance is doing great as always in his agility class. I think I'm finally going to enter him in a trial! Since he doesn't have his contact behavior down yet and he can't yet weave (see rants below on both topics) I'm debating about registering him for CPE and doing jumpers. My instructors have said the CPE novice is very easy and Lance is more than ready. But he also has never done agility at a different facility besides the state fair which didn't go so well. I haven't been able to enter Lance into any fun matches besides a few that have been at my club. There's a CPE show coming up mid October so we will see...

Weave rant- Ok I know I don't have full right to rant on this subject since I really don't practice Lance's weaves much outside of class. He's been introduced to the channel method and the poles have been almost closed since forever, but I haven't touched them in ages. Mainly I've been doing 2x2's but only at class.

Well regardless of my right to rant, Lance has progressed extrmely fast with 2x2's and now do 3 sets that are completely closed from any angle around the clock with confidence and speed. I am aware that there is a ton of things to proof still but I figured that since the 3 sets of 2 are now closed and at proper spacing that his means Lance can weave, right? Wrong. Lance has ZERO clue of what to do on a reglation set (same spacing). It's not like he's even doing the entry and pulling out, Lance is completely clueless on anything to do with normal poles. I can take him to the 2x2 set at weird angle and Lance does it with speed and ease, but take him immediately to a real set and Lance is clueless. Idiot. My insturctors have no idea. The only suggestion is that maybe since the 2x2's don't have any stripes and are brown, Lance doesn't see the white and orange poles as being the same??? I'm not sure of what to do with this one. I mean besides practicing more, of course :)

Contacts rant- Ok this one I have been practicing. I admit I've gotten pretty lax the past two weeks when we were a hotel, but before that I was out there almost every day with my board. For those who need a review, Lance has been doing running contacts mainly Silvia Trkman style. Since he was jumping on a completely flat board, and I mean completley flying over the contacts even when flat!, I started teaching Lance to hit a small black mat with his feet while running. Overall Lance has progressed. Lance hasn't flew over the contacts in a long time, but this progress has been extremely slow. Right now the board isn't even knee high and Lance still has only a 80% success rate of hitting his mat and a lower success rate if my criteria were to simply not jump. This is huge progress from where we've started, but it's also been all summer of working on this, and almost 2 months since I got the mat. I really don't know what to do with Lance. I'm not oppossed to teaching him a 2o2o, but I am worried about Lance slamming into the ground to do it, especially on the aframe with his corgi body.


Vito of course is doing amazing in agility class too! He is having no problem with his early movement into the intermediate class (due to my schedule conflicts) and is actually right in the middle of the group. I have also started running with a tennis ball as a reward which has been getting Vito some more speed. Since I haven't been throwing the ball, just handing it to him, I've been able to obtain a nice balance between some speed and still have Vito actually listen to me :)

Last night Vito did the dog walk for the first time since I've really started working on his contacts and Vito did superb!!!! At home his board has been raised to about 6 inches lower than the full height dog walk and Vito is doing very well. He has about a 90% success rate on running over the board (no mat needed) and usually hits a paw in the last foot of the board even. Class was the first time Vito has actually ran across the dog walk to the decent as I place him at the top of the board at home. I did help him out by slowing my pace down as he performed the obstacle, but still I was quite pleased with his performance!

I am also not worried about Vito generalizing his weave poles. I haven't been doing a ton of work with Vito weaving as he isn't even 11 months yet, but in class Vito has been doing a bit of 2x2 work with the poles only slightly open. Well in class yesterday the real weave poles were set up right next to it for the dogs who were ready to weave (everyone else actually) and Vito tried very hard to do them instead! He failed of course, but actually he got the general idea down and did hit the entries right!