Catching up with some training

So, we’ve had a couple of weekends off from flyball competition and it’s been quite nice to do other things for a change. Admittedly we did train twice last week (we managed to find sufficient breaks in the awful weather we’ve been having!) but that in itself made quite a refreshing change! I’m pleased with the progress the youngsters are making. We probably made the most progress with Travis and Maisie, both of whom are already running well in starters but had areas we needed to work on so we did lots of chute training and made some real improvements in their respective box turns as well as running them both over higher hurdles (11” which I think will be Travis’s height once he’s measured…I expect Maisie will be 12”) and without any training wings and both did really great…so proud of them :o) Perhaps the biggest achievment with these two is that we managed to get them passing tightly with each other, this has been quite a challenge as you might expect with two playful, similarly aged pups that have been brought up and live in the same household together! I think this gives in insight into the change in mentality over the last few weeks, they are taking the whole game much more seriously and are much more focused. All being well Maisie will make her open debut next month and Travis in the new year.

Tarka is now 12 months old and is set to make her starters debut at Redcar in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately I can’t run her this weekend at Norfolk Park as starters is on Saturday only and I’m over at Darlington Champ show that day so she and Maisie will miss out competing :o( Travis will hopefully run in someone else’s starter team with Megan. I did nothing with her on our Sunday training session as she had total ‘spanner’ head on and wouldn’t concentrate at all so on Thursday evening I got her out before anyone else arrived and got her focused on fetching her ball and then did a few runbacks with her. By the time everyone else arrived she was fine and knew exactly what she was doing so we ran her onto the training chute for the first time and she was really good, taking the ball nicely and hurdling well in both directions…good girlie. She’s going very high up the chute at the moment but I think she’ll learn to adjust herself the more she does, we’ll see! The plan at the moment is to run an all cocker team at the starters event at Newark next month, the three littermates…Tarka, Tally and Charlie along with their half brother Travis…god help us! lol

Pixie and Fergus are both also making good progress but we are having an issue with Pixie ‘stalking’ the ball so we’re going to have to do some seperate exercises away from training to try and overcome that. Aston is currently resting from a shoulder injury but should be able to start training in a few weeks, he is certainly very keen, we will just need to manage his very strong ‘eye’ I think. He is an incredibly clever dog and reminds me very much of half sister Faith (only he has a much softer nature…she’s hard as nails..possibly just the difference between boys and girls?) and while he may have Lexie’s tendency to ‘bizzy-ness’ (everything at 100 mph) he is also very smart and figures things out to his advantage very quickly which I have learnt to my cost while he’s been on ‘house rest’! He has learned how to open every door in the house so just happily lets himself in/out of wherever he does/doesn’t want to be, along with anyone else that happens to be on either side of said door! He has also learned how to open the stairgate and has dug a huge hole in the one corner of the garden where this could lead to escape! This has resulted in quite a bit of destructive behaviour we didn’t have from him as a little puppy (he’s now 10 months old) which includes chewing my laptop charger up into a zillion pieces and eating a huge hole out of the seat of my jeans as well as merrily leading everyone else through his escape tunnel so they can galavant around the orchard and storage yard out the back…all in all…he’s been quite hard work of late! I've entered him in a couple of shows next month but he really is bald as a coot at the moment and looking very 'raw' so may not make it into the ring again just yet...we'll see!