Nailed It

When Mary moved out, most of the yard full of equipment left too. I am down to four jumps with one set of extensions to make a triple, two tunnels (one very short one and one tattered old one that might not last the whole summer), a homemade set of PVC base weaves, a table and a dog walk that Mary left behind. Course work is going to be difficult to set up, but will make it easier to focus on dog walk exits. I picked this one to work on today, and set up 8-17.

With my modifications and a lead in and lead out sequence:

The view from the dog walk:

Surprisingly, this wasn't the hardest part of the course. Since I moved the dog walk for the first time since August, and had to set this one up for the first time on my own, I didn't quite know how he would feel about it being in a new location. I mean, he's fine on new dog walks, but HIS dog walk, that's been in the same place for 8 months? I pretty much expected him to fail and leap the contact on the first time through and I pretty much just stood there near the weaves, not cuing anything in particular with my jaw on the floor at his absolutely gorgeous contact behavior and then watched him fly by me into the tunnel. Whoops. Not how that was supposed to go. Second time, BAM! nailed it! And the third and fourth, etc as we tried to get the whole thing right. The dog walk looked great with a variety of hits, so very pleased with that. I did it the way that I thought was most difficult but fastest which was to keep him on my right the entire time. He really had to find the weave entry on his own, bend away from me to make it to the second gap, continue weaving as I passed behind him to get to the left side of the weaves, and then weave all the way into nothing while I held back so I could get up for 12. Lots of really tough weaving skills wrapped up with a hard dog walk exit. Weaves: never been a problem for him. At least I trained something right. 

What was harder was 1-3, getting him to come between the triple and 3, then doing it again 16-17-18. Did the lead out with a forced front and had to get really low to convince him to come in for the FF and not take the triple. 17 I did with a whiskey turn (a really sharp rear cross), which he did no problem once I got him to turn and not take the triple again by really holding lots of eye contact. I wanted to do 14 as a reverse wrap and have him turn to the left over it, but he kept wanting to turn right no matter how well I thought I cued the turn. Probably need to do a better job of making my whiskey cross and reverse wrap look different. So strange that in trials I'm having such a problem with standard and not as much of an issue with jumpers, but in training its these jump sequences that give me the most to work on.