Over the weekend we participated in an agility competition at one of our favorite outdoor venues, the local YMCA camp.
The courses were fun and challenging. The dogs were happy. But my, it was hot. Here is what the dogs did most of the time we were there:
Luckily there was a river nearby where the dogs were able to cool off a bit.
Agility trials are like the weather. The conditions are not always ideal, you can’t really control it, the best you can do is be prepared.
As sunny and hot as it was, I had a bit of a rain cloud over my head. You see, I backslid into a bit into perfectionist thinking, getting overly frustrated by handling errors on my part; the frustration in turn leading to more errors. I never get mad at my dog, but sometimes I take myself too seriously, and I’m afraid that was often the case this weekend.
In agility, they often talk about how you have to work to maintain behaviors the dog already knows. It’s not a simple matter of you train your dog and you’re done. You have to be vigilant. For example, I have not held Maebe responsible for stopping at the end of contact obstacles and now that behavior has disappeared at trials. Unchecked, this will deteriorate further to her flying off the obstacles completely. Time for some contact maintenance work.
For me, I had been at a point where I was just having fun and not worrying about being perfect, but in fact embracing the fact that you cannot be perfect and that of course you are going to make mistakes and that those mistakes are valuable for letting you know what you need to work on. Well, without really realizing it, the more I trained, the more I believed I shouldn’t be making mistakes. At all. Guess how fun that makes things. So what was good about this trial was that it was an opportunity to reset myself; to do some maintenance work on my attitude.
Despite my attitude, Maebe ended up getting a games title and qualified/placed in about half of her runs. Which is pretty respectable.
Django, my wife’s dog, finished the second day of the trial with a perfect day, which is fitting, because she doesn’t obsess over having things like perfect days. She just goes out there and does her best with her dog and that tends to pay off. I’ve learned a lot from the two of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment