Fun Private Lesson

Yesterday Jonah and I had a great session with Grace.  We didn't have any other dogs in the ring, so it was just us and focusing on our own skills.

We started with a fun jumpers sequence of 11 jumps.  It included a threadle, 180, forward send to a wrap and other fun challenges.  Jonah was excellent.  The only 'mistake' we had was a dropped bar on the send/wrap when I slammed on the brakes and he was startled.  My fault.  One other time he turned left when I was ambiguous about the send (I'd envisioned him turning right).  Grace said that as I was slowing I actually drifted left, which he picked up as a RC cue.  Again, my fault.

The fun part was that Grace had us handle one section a few times and timed each one.  It looked like this:

My first inclination was to FC on the landing side of 3.  It was tight and Jonah had to slow way down, but his line was very efficient and it ran well.  5.8 seconds.

Next I did a RC over 3, so he turned left and ran the longer route.  This way he was able to really dig in after making the turn and had a lot more speed going over 4 and 5.  The longer route was costly, though.  6.1 seconds.

The third way I did this was to have lateral and forward distance over 1, drift into the pocket between 2 and 3, rotate towards him and send to 3 with my left arm as I'm facing him.  Then I tucked close to 3, did a BC and picked him up on my right as he wrapped 3 to the left again.  Thus, he was running essentially the same path as last time, but the BC encouraged a shorter wrap.  It was also 5.8 seconds.  

The first handling was definitely the easiest for me, but I think he might have liked the BC best because he didn't have to put on the brakes so hard.  Anyway, it was lots of fun to have a stopwatch on us.  My perceptions of what was fastest weren't always the reality.

After working through this sequence we did some gamble work.  It was just a box of jumps, where you sent the dog across the box ahead of you (you can't go into the box), and then have the dog do a 270 and jump across the box the other way:

Conceptually pretty basic, but it proved to have some challenges for us.

The first time Jonah did not send out to 2.  He started that way but got concerned when I stopped at the line and turned back to me.  We need to work on forward sends (and we did, today, if you read our last post).  The second time and from there on out he got 2, but he was not as confident as I would like.

The first time we tried to go across the box 3 to 4, we got it.  It was a bit of a timing game, where you had to wait long enough for the dog to commit to the correct side of 3 (without support Jonah would have come in the gap between 2 and 3), but then you had to get moving to show movement forward and not let the dog curl in over the backside of 1.  As I said, the first time we got it, but subsequently I screwed up the timing a few times.  

I realized that I could sort of cheat a little bit.  If I was patient, I could wait for Jonah to come back towards me, coming past 3, and then I could re-set the line for 3 and 4 starting with a send out to 3.  This worked pretty reliably, but it would be nice to not have to do that.  I think I'll set this gamble up again some time.  It was a nice one--not too hard, but hard to do really nicely.

Then, at the end of our lesson, the dog in the next slot came into the ring and Jonah didn't bark once!