It’s a bit late for New Year’s resolutions but in the sleepless nights I’ve been having recently I’ve been thinking about my goals and aspirations for this year and the deadlines set by the start of the show season and Hex’s future litter and I realise that if I’m going to make G6 before August I have some serious work to!
Hex has sped up in the last 6 months and I’m glad, I’ve been pushing for the speed and I’ve got it but I’ve lost our effective turns. Hex is definitely fast enough to win a class, but she’s not fast enough that she can afford a wide turn and still win a higher graded class. Over the past couple of months I’ve been helping her stride and learn when to bounce as well as speeding up her contacts and pushing for more difficult weave entrances, but wide corners are still getting the better of us.
I know that I haven’t had the time to do anywhere near as much I’d like to but it’s difficult when you haven’t got someone about to watch you, there’s a risk you’ll fall in to bad habits and not even realise you’d done anything wrong. As far as I was concerned I had put all the ground work in, she knew it all, why isn’t she doing it now?! I’d been working on deceleration with Anthony Clarke with some great results, but I can’t always be there to decel and this is when I’m still having problems. But what else could I do with a dog that barks non-stop at me? I’ve been saying to myself she can’t hear me, so what is the point on me commanding her when she’s just going to drown me out? But as the April show season looms I have been forced to make some decisions and my decision is that she should LISTEN!
I have been running my thoughts through with Mum, Sarah, Abi and Toni and I am so grateful for having these people around me, sometimes it just helpful to talk your thoughts through and justify them, if you can’t justify them then there’s something wrong.
Both Toni and Abi have brought to my attention that when things aren’t going to plan I have a habit of using commands out of context and that my timing has become pretty poor. So now that I’ve decided to revert back to my original verbal commands, it was time to re-cap my Hex dictionary. This didn’t take long as it was pretty much a case of going back to basics and relearning what we already knew and did, a group lesson last night and a private lesson with Toni this morning confirmed this – it’s not Hex which is the problem, she knows it all and has retained everything I taught her, it’s bloody me which is the problem!
Last night I made a real effort to use my verbal commands in a course situation (I think I walked the course 8 times and was saying the commands aloud to help them sink in), I only used the wrong command a couple of times when I ran it but my timing was still out. This morning out of a group situation Toni set a number of sequences to test Hex’s ability and see how much work we would really need to put into this, I had given Toni my Hex dictionary and before each exercise we made sure I knew what I was going to say and when I was going to say it, everything we set Hex did right (unless I panicked), it was so great to feel in control of her turns again – reverse turns, shoulder turns, decel turns, rear cross turns and turns around a pin wheel. I swear we just went through the lesson going ‘can she do that?’ – ‘yup’, ‘okay but can she do that now?’ – ‘yep’, ‘okay but you can tighten that up by doing this’ – ‘So I can! Awesome!’. Toni did a grand job of keeping me calm and consistent (thanks Toni!) and I was really, really pleased with the results. I cannot believe that we have had it there all along and I’ve just been throwing it away by not practicing and making excuses for us. Hex actually got faster when I cued her with her directions and I could hear myself think and command which could only mean one thing – Hex wasn’t barking as much as usual, so she must have been thinking or maybe it’s that she’s not as frustrated with me so she doesn’t feel the need to swear at me all the time? Only time will tell but I really am pleased with the progress we have made this week and my new year’s resolution is to keep up the good work! – Ensure that I stay consistent, don’t praise her for my faults, stick to my dictionary and set time and special exercises aside to achieve my primary objective which at the moment is tighten up our corners to shave our times down.
I read a Chinese proverb recently ‘Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back’, I have dropped back and it’s time to start rowing again.
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