Our first seminar

Coulee and I attended our first agility seminar this weekend. It was a lot of fun. We started out on Saturday night with a "lecture" on understanding your dog and yourself and how you need to know your strengths and weaknesses. We watched a lot of video and it was good to see lots of different types of dogs succeeding at agility - from wild and crazy to slow and laidback. It gave me food for thought for both Coulee and Lacey.

Sunday morning was the actual seminar part where we got to run our dogs. Coulee did GREAT!!! All her mistakes were my fault and they were generally pretty minor. I dropped an arm while stumbling in the sand, so she missed a jump. I sent her too early to a tunnel and she chose the wrong end. Things like that. Her start line is definitely improving and I was able to get two jumps ahead of her on the start and do a front cross after the two jumps and a tunnel. The only unfortunate thing was I didn't feel challenged. I was hoping that we could walk away with something concrete to work on that I didn't alreay know about. I know our start lines need work. I know she doesn't know how to weave and I know that I need to help her get over her fear of the teeter. What I did finally figure out was that Coulee could be a really good agility dog if I could just get over those things and then we could advance to more challenging seminars. I also reconfirmed that Sarah and Amanda are great instructors.

The video below is the final run of the day when we finally put the whole course together. You'll see that we run past the weave poles and we baulk at the teeter - we forgot to set up a spotter for it and as Coulee is already kind of afraid of it, I didn't want to risk it without someone there.

I could have stayed to watch the afternoon session where I probably would have learned a lot more but I was tired of freezing my ass of in the area when it was beautiful out and I hadn't seen Marlin in a few days so I decided a walk in the coulees with the two girls was more important. More about that later.