Courses that Give you Nightmares...

[cmae]

...literally! I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this darn course!!

Cruz and I attended our weekly skills and drills night as usual, where we were focusing on turns.. and we walked on to a nightmare course! Backsides, threadles, serps, wraps - you name it! On each run we were supposed to turn our dogs different ways to see which works best for us. GREAT practice, just too advanced for us! I decided I wasn't going to put my baby dog through it and instead focused on little parts of the course. One day we will go back and re-try this, but I am content to watch others navigate for the mean time. But this is definitely something I wouldn't want to see in any trial, no matter how good my team was! What types of elements are in your 'worst nightmare' courses?

I will attach the course map here for anyone that needs to work on turns

http://i1378.photobucket.com/albums/ah83/cassbulandres/turnskathykeats_zpsrxnkqgxh.jpg

Most teams had problems with sequence 9-14. How would you handle it?

 

[seashel]

:lolIs this one of Kathy Keats' ones? I too would be wanting to break this down in training and running as small sections. 9-10 is a 180 so I would have him on my left and then probably FC or BC after 10 to take round the right wing of 11. I find course maps difficult to plan on though and inevitably make the wrong choice! This is the sort of course I think Epic and I will need to be mastering next year as our higher grade courses seem to be full of threadles, backsides etc. Personally I really like these different handling manoeuvres and Epic seems to as well, but nightmare courses for me are ones with long distances between jumps and tunnel discriminations. Winter practice for us is going to be a lot of tunnel work as it's something which we are struggling with at the moment.

There are two courses I have watched that give me chills - one had HUGE distances between the obstacles but the scariest one of all had two parallel straight rigid tunnels with just a small gap (big enough to run through) between them...it was a lot of fun to watch though

 

[cmae]

:lolIs this one of Kathy Keats' ones? I too would be wanting to break this down in training and running as small sections. 9-10 is a 180 so I would have him on my left and then probably FC or BC after 10 to take round the right wing of 11. I find course maps difficult to plan on though and inevitably make the wrong choice! This is the sort of course I think Epic and I will need to be mastering next year as our higher grade courses seem to be full of threadles, backsides etc. Personally I really like these different handling manoeuvres and Epic seems to as well, but nightmare courses for me are ones with long distances between jumps and tunnel discriminations. Winter practice for us is going to be a lot of tunnel work as it's something which we are struggling with at the moment.

There are two courses I have watched that give me chills - one had HUGE distances between the obstacles but the scariest one of all had two parallel straight rigid tunnels with just a small gap (big enough to run through) between them...it was a lot of fun to watch though

Yes, Kathy Keats! It was an international course she did in Austria I believe. I handled it exactly as you said except with a FC not a blind. A lot of teams with bigger dogs (and longer strides) ended up decided that a double FC (one after 9 AND 10) worked well. Too many steps for me but it seemed to work for them!

Cruz has recently gained major confidence and turned into a speed demon so turns have become an issue for us. My cues for crosses used to be right on time and now he's gone before I even start! He has also started flanking me lots so turns and calls to hand will be our winter project!

 

[corbinam]

This looks terrifiying and I'm NOT a newbie.

For 9-14, I'd do a lateral send at 9, and push to the back side of 10 with a blind on the landing side. Front cross the landing side of 11, rear 13, turn to the inside at 14, then threadle 15-16 with 2 fronts.

Actually none of that would happen because we would have messed up a long time ago