Competition mode

Mental training

Iris Kieme

I have been doing a lot of reading and practicing of mental aspect of competing. I have tried to find a right focus when I enter the competition ring. Usually I have had very different mind sets depending on the day. Now goal has been to built a mode that I would perform as good as I could. To achieve this I have read several books about mental training and writing a diary about my trip and doing homework from the books. It has been a hard work to find out your strengths and weaknesses. To me hardest things has been to actually say to myself that I am good at something.

Visualization of event and training situation has been the most important tool for me. This has given me a change to find out what things give me power before the course and what are the biggest distractions. Mental visualization of things can take you to competition before it even happens and you can go through things that it happening and make them as a normal thing to you. So you can focus you energy to the real performance. I also use this technique to train different handling maneuvers. You can so much work in your mind before an event or training then you can safe you energy to a top performance in any part of your life. I have use visualization before in my work life but now I have used it even more to little details that can  affect my work.

Pixie competition mode

Iris Kieme

I have done a lot of in my mind but then I have found out that our old mistakes come to hunt us in our competitions. Pixie does super 2on2off work in training. In competition she does poorly. Even though I trained 3 competition full stop contacts, she jumped 2 A-frame contact on competition on Sunday. This was really frustrating feeling. Her mistakes comes from the time that I tried to make her A-frame to running contact (my biggest mistake!! try to make 2on2off dog to running contact dog). I have know idea at this point to make this mistake gone from our competition performance. Pixie's drive in competition is much more higher than in training. Especially this problem comes out if I have to run in front of her in full speed. I guess we have to train this again in a competition. I just hope we will get to point that I can actually just compete with her and trust her work.

Competition mode to a dog and for handler is thing that need to be trained. Most of us get much more excited in a competition and dogs catch up this excitement. I have made many mistakes in competition of letting Pixie take too early from start, leave contact zone before a release cue and so on. Could I have done a perfect competition dog if I had stop every time Pixie broke our training?? Or would I have to still correct mistakes in competition?? I can't be sure but I know mistakes will come during her whole carrier. I will try to be more black and white with Freya and try to make more reliable. We will see how this goes. :D


That's all for now... Next some ob and Nosework update...

MLPF