Ok so we had training for the first time in over a month and Marcie gave me a lot of Information and that information was: my rewards suck and everyone else’s rewards are better. Good to know!

I am obviously no expert in agility, and I only instruct classes at my club because there is nobody else to do it. I’m trying my best to explain to my Foundations students why I am teaching them the things I am – I’m trying to get them to understand that it’s building the dog’s (and handler’s) skills layer by layer. My lack of experience shows in my troubleshooting, but I am trying.

What I get super frustrated with is the pre-trialler students, the ones that are about where I am at or a bit below, who pay barely any attention to their handling. I think I’m going to have to really emphasise this soon because it’s driving me crazy that they are not paying attention to planning their handling and giving consistent cues. I don’t expect anyone to be perfect – I’m certainly not – but I do expect fairness and I’ve got a few students who are being really unclear in their handling and do not take my feedback on board. If I point out their bad cues and random unplanned crosses, they just shrug it off. They especially don’t care if the dog was “successful” in the end. It drives me crazy!!! Why would you keep doing this? Why do you want to be unfair to your dog? I don’t care if your dog is fast or intense, or you are uncoordinated or whatever the excuse is, if you’re going to do agility you need to develop a clear handling system that your dog understands and you need to plan your runs at least a little bit.

I instruct these handlers as best as I can, but I don’t know how to bring them up on this. I have a week off next week as I’m away for work so perhaps I can think about how I’m going to approach this issue without discouraging them.

@faithliesinashes replied:

Is that 8 agility trials total? Like do you do double days, where there are 2 trials held on the one day?

Eight total for 2022. Seven are run by my club, six of those are doubles (double jumping on Friday night, double agility on Saturday night) and one is a triple (triple jumping on Friday night, triple agility on Saturday night). The only other trial is at the Royal Darwin Show, which is a single trial over one afternoon.

So that’s 16 runs per category for the whole year (except Open will only have 13 for the year as we’re not doing Open at the triple trial). I’m still only in Jumping as I haven’t finished contacts or weaves training. So if I only do Novice Jumping, and I am missing the April trial due to Marcie’s heat and the June trial as I’m away, that gives me 12 runs for the year. If I enter Open Jumping I can add 8 more runs. If I manage to be ready for agility later in the year I can add Novice Agility and Open Agility maybe.

But yeah, not nearly the same amount of chances as other places.

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Gamer Girl in Disguise

June 17, 2018

Today I got to hang out with my dad for Father’s Day and before I have my last loading dose tomorrow. So, while he was working a bit and relaxing this morning, we discovered that our favorite racing game, Burnout Revenge, is now backwards compatible from the Xbox 360 to Xbox One! I played it for about an hour, winning some cars for us to play.

Now, here is why I’m telling you this. I haven’t been able to play video games properly in ages. Sure, I joined gamer club in my junior year with a good friend of mine being president; but when I played him in Soul Calibur, and beat him one of the times, my entire body was shaking and I had no control over my head afterward. It took so much energy to just play one game. I even sort of got teased by the other members because they knew how much I wanted to beat my friend; and they just thought it was because I was so hell bent on beating them that I practically collapsed when I won. But I think my friend knew why I was shaking and weak. It was because I was reallyweak.

But not today.

Today, I won a little victory that I was praying to Castiel would happen.