Saturday, December 19, 2015

Agility year coming to the end

FREYA

Freya had now her second competition in A3. I had a goal to just get her some experience and take notes what we need to train. Our first run was pretty chaotic but we had some good bits. On the second run everything clicked and she did super clean run. Freya also win the competition and got her first Cert for Agility Champion title. We had really a moment when we worked together as we do in training. On the last two runs we had few hard parts and some problems with jumping. So lots of homework to do with Freya. On total I was very pleased with her work and how she did the contacts etc. We will have nice base work to build on her skills to higher level.

Here is her winning run from TSAU:




Jumping skills has been something I have always been interested. Freya has had some problems with jumping every now and then. Especially going over diagonal jump has been her problem area. I have already made some work with the 8 figure training. This has helped her to learn the right take off position. We have still problems when you have more than one diagonal jump in a row. In this she has sometimes problems to make the right lead change in her canter. This problem I have work with a tight slalom training I learned from Linda Mecklenburg. Freya has become better and in fast lead changes and she has done the exercise in 40 cm height. I started with very low bars just to make her used to the exercise and give time to find the right settings from her body. She improved a lot but she has still some side differences so I will continue this work. I bought a book of Susan Salo from the Clicker Expo. It has a lot of good exercises and my goal in 2016 is to keep one jumping skills training each week to improve Pixie and Freya’s jumping. We will see what kind of results we will get.


PIXIE

Oh boy we have had a hard year. First we started with training our start line stays then we worked half year with contacts. Our National Team tryout went down with one jumped A-frame contact again. European Open we had the first reserve place and I got to know that we got spot too late. I had already had to cancel our hotel room and car. So no EO for us. It had been totally shitty year with lots of training in competition and not really enjoying competing at all. Finally our work has starting to pay of and we did two clear rounds in our last competition. It felt like doing agility with Pixie. This feeling had been lost almost for half year. It has been one the hardest year in agility. I hope our work will pay off and we will have super year 2016. 

Here is video from our last competition:


Merry Christmas and Happy New year 2016 for everyone!!!!!

Marianne, Pixie and Freya



Monday, December 14, 2015

It all about dancing :D

Dog Dancing


I have watched for years beautiful dog dancing videos from YouTube. As a hobby I have trained some of tricks I have seen with Pixie and Freya. After Clicker Expo I got my last kick to start training for it. Michele Pouliot lecture had the coolest videos of dog dancing and I got million ideas of different tricks to train. Now I had a goal to really use my passion to train dogs’ new things because in freestyle everything is possible. I wanted learn more about the sport and I entered myself to Michele Pouliot online class on Freestyle. I also drove to Ylöjärvi to learn more about rules of dog dancing in Finland. At this point my basic knowledge is growing more and more. Still lot to learn to even enter a first competition but I’m at a right path.

On our Independence Day I traveled to Helsinki Winner Show to see Nordic Championships in dog dancing. I wanted to what kind routines people had built and get new ideas for our routines. I saw absolutely amazing performances. Pair work really good together and their routines were nicely built. I also had a little wakening the heal work to music could be fun too. This is all thanks to Nordic Champion pair Sidsel Rychter Lauridsen and German Panda. Their performance just hit me to my heart and hard. It was fast and it had a good story. After this performance I told my friend this could be Freyas’ sport because she love to do heal work and she has super attitude doing it. Freestyle winner Smedberg Jonna and bordercollie Lizzroys Zoya also had wonderful and sporty performance which I really liked and had a vision that our might someday look like that with Pixie. Totally it was wonderful day and I almost cried because the performances touched me so much. I think I found something that really have waken big motion inside me.

Dog dancing work with Pixie

I have started built up our routine around song Bum bum bum by Jari Sillanpää. I had the feeling it had a nice beat and it had a love story in it. I had right away some ideas what could be filled in the routine. Now I have done work with separated tricks and also some back chaining them together. It has been so much and I have taught lots of new trick to Pixie and I have started few hard ones for the future. I have done lots of work also to clean my training to get more and more accurate performances to cues. I have started make more clear to Pixie what I want her to do on each cue. When I have trained tricks as hobby thing I haven’t been totally specific what I want her to do. Our work has payed of and Pixies’ performance has improved a lot. Working with these dog dancing tricks has been super cool!!! We will see how our first performance will go but I’m really looking forward to it.

Here are some trick we will using to our routine:








Still lot to do and new ideas to work on. Half of trick are not video yet. I hope to film them soon to everybody to see.

That's all for now!! Next time agility update.

MPF