Ok, so if I type fast, I should be able to just squeak in under the wire of midnight Sunday deadline for posting the details of this week’s challenge. LOL

I finally did decide on a challenge for this week. I thought it would be appropriate to focus on Dare’s Rally Obedience training for this challenge, since she’s entered in her first AKC Rally trial next weekend. One of the biggest challenges to training for Rally more often than we do, is the time that is involved in setting up a Rally course. It’s a real pain in the rear! So, we usually just train individual Rally stations instead. This week our friend that lives about an hour and a half away sent out an email about her Open Agility practice night. She said that if anyone was interested, we could set up a Rally course too. I jumped at the idea. Ok, that’s not exactly true. I didn’t jump. I was happy at the thought of having help to set up a course, but I’m also tired, so the thought of driving for 3 hours to do this was not thrilling.

Dare, Zoe and I packed into the car and made the trip we left home at 5 this evening and we got back home a little after 10 tonight. Even though it was a long drive, I’m so glad we did it. We had a great time. It’s so much easier to set up things and train when you have someone to do it with. So, without further rambling…here’s our little Rally set-up. I’ll apologize in advance, I didn’t see that I had cut off part of the course when I set up the tripod. You’ll just have to fill in the blank spots with your imagination when we wander off the screen.

So, some of you may have been having trouble getting to the blog for the last few days. Apparently the host sold to another company, with no advance warning. It was supposed to be “seamless”. Well, it has been slightly less than seamless, but it all seems ok now. It’s really all over my head. I just like for things to work, without me having to know how. I spend enough time unraveling the mysteries of why things work the way they do when I’m training the dogs.

Anyway, things are going fine here, except that I seem to be scattered all over the place in just about every aspect of my life these days. My parents went on a trip again, so I spent Monday through Wednesday up there doing chores. I don’t know if I mentioned that or not. LOL I made several attempts both while I was up at my parents and since I’ve been home to come up with one training challenge. I just can’t seem to focus well. (I do have a challenge ready to post about though). I’m not focusing on my medical coding course either. That really bugs me. I just feel like I’m getting further and further behind with it. When I looked into it, Online Schools seemed like a great option for me. I guess time will tell whether that was the case or not.

Ok, so I decided to step way out of my comfort zone for this first week, and video and post something that I would normally never consider. It is related to Heeling for Obedience and Rally. The part that made me hesitate is that it wasn’t a challenge for the dogs this week. The challenge was for me to get out and practice my own footwork for heeling patterns.

For any of you that have ever tried heeling in the ring with the judge giving you directions, you probably understand how much harder it is than it would seem. The simple directions “right turn”, “left turn”, “about turn” and then the “fast”, “slow”, “normal” and “halt” when given in the context of heeling in the obedience ring seem in my mind more on the level of a college education, rather than the kindergarten level skills that you might assume. LOL I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m nervous, or the fact that I’m worried about where my dog is in relation to me, or what, but I can tell you that it’s something I could improve in.

One of the things that I’ve noticed over the years is that my long legs in proportion to the size of my dogs, can present a problem for them being able to stay in heel position. Take the initial step forward as an example. I know in my mind that I should make that a smaller step than usual, to give my dog a chance to get up and start moving with me, but I seem to get excited and take this gigantuan step forward instead, like my enthusiasm for moving forward is going to be contageous for my dog. LOL Another example is my turns. On right turns and on about turns, I have really worked hard to add some smaller steps to give my dog a chance to keep up, but then I seem to again take this huge step out of the turn and as a result make my dog look like they are lagging. It’s all really ticky, silly stuff I know. But I was so excited by Dare’s Rally score the other day that I thought, I should really put forth some more effort on my part to improve my heeling skills to keep her heeling nicely.

So, when we went to the park and also when we went to our friend’s house to train this week, I asked for them to run me through some heeling without a dog. Sounds simple right? LOL There were times I wondered if I needed some Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina health plans in case I got my feet too tangled up. I don’t know if you’d call our challenge a raging success in regards to improving my skill, but it did give me some really good information to work with. I guess in that sense, it was really successful.

So, without further explanation of this odd video…here you go. Hey Ricky, is there some sort of award for having the most embarrassing handler that my dogs could win?

So, I think I said that one of the greatest challenges to training for me is just getting out there in the first place sometimes. Well, today I had the opposite problem.

It all started off normally enough. I met up with a friend and we trained at one of the local parks this morning. We worked with all the dogs, and then got ready to leave. We dismantled the jumps I brought, folded up the crates, chairs, etc and loaded the cars. I got lazy and didn’t put Dare in her crate, just left her loose in the car while we packed up. Can you guess where this story is headed?

We did our final checks of the area we’d been setup to make sure nothing was left behind. I went to get in my car, and realized I didn’t have my keys. I asked my friend if she saw my keys when she folded up my chair. Her response? “I put them on the front seat of your car.” It was one of the moments when your heart just sinks, because you know it’s not going to end well. Sure enough, as I looked through the window, there the keys were on the passenger seat. Unfortunately, Dare had been eager to watch us pack and had stepped on the doorlock in the process.

The windows were rolled down, enough for me to get my arm through, but of course, not quite far enough for me to push the doorlock button. I shoved and shoved and shoved, until I thought I’d gotten my arm permanently lodged in the door/window space. We worked it back out, (but boy you should see the bruises that run from the inside of my upper arm down to my elbow). We finally dug a dowel out of my friend’s car and used it to hook the keys and get them high enough to reach. Woot! I was so relieved. Dare in the meantime was staring at me, like “I always knew my mom was “challenged”. LOL

So, my lesson for today…just when you think you know what your training challenges are, something new will pop up to suprise you. Don’t worry Ricky, this isn’t our official training challenge for the week though. We’ll still plan on posting about that on Sunday.

I know what you’re thinking…”it’s about time she realized she was “challenged”. LOL In addition to just admitting the fact that I’m challenged, (in oh so many ways) I should just clarify that this post is about a training challenge from  Ricky that we are taking part in. You can read all the details there, but I’ll just sum up really basically here too. The goal is to try to do one thing a week that takes us out of our normal, comfortable training zone. Personalize it to you and your dogs needs. It can be anything that you find a challenge in your training. Training in new locations, trying out new handling methods for agility, working to improve behavioral issues, etc. What you choose is pretty much only limited by your imagination.

I got a good start today, but I’ll save the details for Sunday. That’s when everyone who wants to participate will post about their adventures. Sometimes I really think one of the biggest challenges I have to overcome is just getting myself out the door in the first place.