First group class with Kyara this Sunday

Thank you Cheryl! I will definitely have a quick talk with the trainer before class today to let her know I will not be doing 2o2o.

My last private session was this Friday and it was obvious that I confused Kyara with the contacts. She jumped off every single one at the end of the dog walk and only put one paw on the end of the A-Frame. :( I sure learned my lesson, if you are using one method, stick to it!

At least for the rest of the stuff she was fine and less distracted by the surrounding noises.

I sure hope the group trainer will allow me to run through the contacts and not just have me skip over the exercises, because I won't have many more training opportunities with my private classes done for winter. I might rent an interior field a few times this winter but it is about 50 minutes away from my place :dead:. I'm definitly addicted to this sport, funny thinking that a year ago I knew almost nothing about it and didn't even have a dog yet. :lol:
 
I was really happy with the second class on Sunday. :smile2:

I had a good discussion with the trainer about running contacts before the class and she was really great about it. She explained some of her worries with running contacts and the difficulties of going back to train 2o2o if necessary. So last night I took on the project of building a contact plank to practice contacts at home and video our practices. Hopefully it will allow me to track our progress with the running contacts.

During class, I was able to have Kyara completely off leash for the first 20 minutes :biggrin2:. I'm pretty proud of her for being so focused on me even though there were 4 others dogs there and 6 people she didn't know. It was great! It went really well off leash until we started practicing adding speed to running in the chute, she got too excited so back on came the leash between her turns. Still pretty good for her second group class!

I really am glad I decided to do this class. I can already see how it is helping with Kyara's focus & patience, as well as with my basic handling skills.
 
Glad to hear you discussed this with the trainer. Sometimes it's not easy to speak up, but we must at times, otherwise, we'll just screw our poor pups up more, hehehe.

BTW, IMHO, I don't think it's hard to retrain contacts if needed. I am NOT saying it's super easy and doesn't require a lot of time, but I am saying, it can be done. Shelties are smart, they can relearn.

Heck, Koji went from learning 2o2o basics, to a running, to a 4-on and now back to a 2o2o. If I had the time and space, I'd go for a running contact, but I don't have either, so it would've been hard to keep up with it.

If you have the space and time to make sure the running contacts are correct, I think you'll be fine. And if you do need to retrain, I think you can do that too. So don't get too discouraged.

Otherwise, glad to hear class 2 went really well. :) Can't wait to see video's. Many of us keep track of things like this in a blog. So, something to think about. ;)
 
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