Working Out Agility Kinks

Rocco tears it up through the tire

Last weekend we took home more learnings than ribbons from our AKC agility trial. Yup, that's right, even Rocco's not a rocket all the time!

We did have one qualifying run, in FAST, which is a run where you devise your own course based on getting the most points in a set amount of time. It also includes a distance challenge where you send your dog out to complete a series of obstacles (usually two or three) without crossing a designated line (a real line tapped into the dirt).



Most of his runs looked like this...

... once he got past the first few obstacles.

The problem was, most of Rocco's runs started like this.

Stopping in front of a jump, counts as a refusal and we started every run (usually at the third obstacle or so) with a refusal. Then he'd run the rest of the course brilliantly! Since we're running at the Excellent level, the run needs to be clean and under time. So no refusals allowed!

So now we're working on motivation off the starting line, making the entire run as fun as the last 3/4 of every run!

Have you had a training issue you worked through?

Let us know about it in the comments below!

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