Flying Poodles

The joy of agility…

Cheryl asked me to write a brief bio for her web site, since I’ll be teaching the fundamentals course again starting in January. It wasn’t particularly brief, I’m afraid, but oh well.

Anyway, it got me thinking about why I do agility.

Trials are a high point–there’s really nothing like taking on that challenge and doing well at it. It’s hard to do well at a trial: everything has to come together at the same time and then stay together for 15 or 20 obstacles. The dog needs to do her job; I need to keep the course straight and do my job–not let down, not stop to admire the dog’s performance on a complex sequence, keep it together… It’s not easy, so the thrill of a Q is real and well-earned.

But that’s not why I do agility.

It’s all about the training. Elly is a challenging dog. She has a sense of humor a mile wide, and an ability to get into trouble that’s absolutely amazing. I realized early on that she needed to be kept learning ALL THE TIME or I would be screwed. I mean: she can levitate onto counters in a split second. After going through the basic courses the Humane Society offers, I searched for more. I happened on agility, and I gave it a try.

With agility, I can lie in bed awake at night–insomniac that I am–and think “what can I teach the dogs today? And how can I best teach it?” Now, sometimes the answer is “I need to work on contacts.” Sometimes it’s “distance around an arc of jumps.” Or “sequencing with the chute.” The point is: always something to train.

I also lie awake and try to figure out what the course is going to be at a trial. With NADAC, you can always count on the jumpers course to have a long sweeping run to a tunnel, and so I can imagine myself handling that. And then I train it. In AKC, you know you’re going to get a pinwheel or two… you get the idea.

<This is embarrassing. It took me TWO edits to clean up all the typos I made the first time around.> <Whoops! Make that THREE edits.>