1TDC Wrapup
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[00:00:00] If you train, compete, or teach dog agility, you're in the right place. Hey there, I'm Megan Foster, creator of Fostering Excellence and Agility. Join me as I share key insights on all things related to dog agility and help find your team's path to excellence and unlock your best year yet. Let's get started.
Hey there, everyone. This is episode 65, and today I would like to do a long overdue wrap-up of the 1TDC UKI Invitational event that Sprint and I attended at the end of March. And I want to do this because it's already a part of my process to [00:01:00] go to an event like this one, break down everything that happened, make some training plans, create some hypotheses around, you know, what needs to be trained, what needs to be improved, what needs to be different about how I move forward, and then testing those theories in future competitions that maybe aren't as high pressure or, um, aren't as important to me, um, and seeing where things are going.
You know, where should I be putting my time and energy? And I want to share that process with you. So the benefit of this being, over a month later is that I have been able to test some of these theories both in training and in competition, so I can give you a lot more detail than I could when I [00:02:00] was first thinking about this immediately after the event.
So first, let's talk a little bit about the event overall. Uh, UKI runs a very well-organized, oiled machine of an event, and this one definitely checks a lot of boxes for me. The judges and courses were spectacular. I really enjoyed all of them, how they made me think. Uh, they were, like, the perfect amount of, you know, balancing dog skills with handler skills.
I did have to run a lot, and that is, you know, obviously the design and the, uh, course size in general, but I never felt overwhelmed by the amount of running, and never felt like something was impossible. So that is, I think, a testament to, [00:03:00] yes, my ability as a handler and the training that I put in to Sprint, but also it means that the course design was really balanced, because that is not always the case.
I do not always feel like, um, that I am fast enough on every course that I encounter. Um, the surface in Chicago is fantastic. I think it is probably as close to perfect as I can imagine. It is a, um, turf with rubber infill. Um, I guess the only complaint is that Sprint doesn't like getting the rubber on her toy and then into her mouth, but we deal with it.
Luckily, she loves her snacks as well, so we can make sure that she's not, um, getting too much rubber in her mouth overall. The schedule of this event is almost too casual, and I am gonna, uh, talk a little bit more about that later on, um, [00:04:00] because I love running only one dog, but this does mean that there's a lot of downtime.
So of the, I think it's five rotations in the morning, um, you're only running in two of them. So there was, like I said, a lot of downtime, which, uh, is great because it means that I have more time to take care of myself and more time to take care of Sprint, but it did bite me at least one time. But overall, I really enjoyed the schedule.
Um, also just in this area, this location in the, in the US, and at this specific site, there is so much great space to walk your dogs in this area. So, um, we had no shortage of decompression time and places to walk, and I really just appreciate that.
All right, now let's dive into my thoughts [00:05:00] on Sprint's performance. Um, the biggest reminder that this weekend kind of gave me is that this sport that we choose to do is so difficult at times, and so... And, like, the faster the dog is, the lower your margin for handler error is, and also the more complicated the course is, the lower the margin for error is.
And when you combine those two things in these high-pressure, very intense situations, it's a very good reminder that this is very, very difficult sport that we play, and it's definitely why I love it so much. But it was overall a very good reminder of, remembering to focus on, how much progress we have made even when the paper results aren't exactly matching that.
Um, however, [00:06:00] I did go into this event with two, um, pretty big unknowns, and this, the first one was, um, our running dog walk retrain. We took a big chunk of our winter training time to try and change Sprint's default dog walk behavior of three striding, um, and change that back to her previous four-stride behavior.
And just before going to the event, um, she was changing to four strides, but it, the four strides was looking a little awkward and, you know, the hits weren't exactly where, where I want them long term, but I could see progress in her behavior. But I had no idea, you know, what was going to happen at the event.
Was she going to default back to what she had been doing for the last year in competition, um, or would the retrain, the new [00:07:00] behavior show up? And, um, the second unknown was just our lack of coursework practice in general. We had a very wet winter. Um, the field that I train on is outdoors. It's the only place I have, um, regular access to to train, so I am, like many of my listeners, kind of stuck with training when the weather allows me to train.
So compared to this, going to this event last year, I felt kind of very unprepared in that way. You know, last year when I went, I was doing, um- coursework kind of weekly leading up to it. Like I said, it was just too wet of a winter to make that happen. So I wasn't totally sure where we stood in putting these bigger, longer, more complicated courses [00:08:00] together.
But I really enjoy this event. Sprint loves the surface. I wanted to go, and so we went with the intention of, you know, seeing where we have made progress. So in reality, when we got there, um, her dog walk was surprisingly okay. Um, the... I think she did, like, five dog walks total, and, you know, all but one of them was a four-strided behavior, and her last dog walk of the weekend in Challengers was her best one.
So it was really interesting and exciting to me that even at that high intensity, high arousal, high pressure event, she was already able to show me that she's capable of giving me the new [00:09:00] behavior and not just falling back on the habit and reinforcement history of three-striding. And I'm talking probably all of last year she did three strides, um, or the majority of them.
So she had a really big habit, well-rehearsed habit of doing three strides, and yet she only did it one time across the four days. So that was really exciting. Um, and our lack of coursework practice in general, um, sure, it, it definitely showed up in some places, but not nearly as obvious as I was sort of expecting.
Um, outside of the course faults that we did get, which I'll go into in just a second, our runs were 85 to 95% according to plan, and a lot of the time when they didn't go to plan, it's just a simple fact [00:10:00] of even if I see things starting to go wrong, and my experience level, um, in the sport does allow me to see things starting to unravel, I can't always save them, even if I do start to react, because she is so powerful, she is so fast, and she does have fantastic obstacle commitment.
And so that's a fact that I have to accept, that if I want to maintain all of that speed, all of that forward focus, all of that great obstacle commitment, that- I'm not always going to be able to save it. Or if I am going to be able to save it, I have to be able to see it unraveling or feel it unraveling even sooner than I would have with all of my previous dogs.
So really, truly 85 to 95% according to plan, like, oh my gosh, I'm thrilled with this result. [00:11:00] And again, while the paper results didn't match how the performance kind of went overall, it was still really, really great to see things that we've been working on show up in really big ways. Like her weave pole entries, making sure that she wraps tight enough to not only get the first gap, but then get the second gap.
She was amazing with her weave pole entries all weekend long and just her turns and responsiveness in general. Like I said, I think that the surface has a huge part in that, that she does her best work on this particular surface, but also the training and conditioning that I've been putting into those things is showing up more and more in bigger ways.
And I'm really excited to see that overall.
All right, so let's talk about the faults. [00:12:00] Um, the biggest things that showed up in my handling errors were some timing errors, some strategy errors, and I also had a bit of a mindset meltdown. And these three errors impacted our results significantly. And w- while that's a big old bummer, right? Um, it's also really great because I can see this, I can coach myself on this, and I can improve.
Um, the mindset meltdown was what I was referring to when I mentioned that the schedule was almost a little too casual. Because I had all this downtime, I felt myself, um, hanging out with my friends more, which, you know, on the surface is not a bad thing at all. I had a fantastic time hanging [00:13:00] out with my friends, watching their runs, cheering them on.
Uh, but by the time Friday afternoon came around, um, I was a little bit of a mess mentally. I was exhausted. My battery was drained. I had such a hard time, you know, keeping the course in my head. Um, I could not get a clean visualization when I was warming up, and if you've heard me talk about visualization, you know that that is a really bad thing for me, um, because I practice this way too, that if I can't visualize the course clean, I don't run it.
And, um, this is the first time that this has happened to me in a really long time. And I immediately, on obstacle two, I cued a blind cross way too early. I sent [00:14:00] her off course immediately, and we actually weren't able to finish that course because she knew I didn't have my act together, and I couldn't be the handler that she needed.
So I learned my lesson, though. And Saturday and Sunday, I made sure to give myself some timeouts in the car, away from the noise, a- even just, like, n- just sitting in the car, breathing, decompressing myself without having to take care of Sprint as well. So it wasn't enough that I was, you know, getting out and taking Sprint for walks.
I needed the time to be out of all the simulation, and I needed time to be out of the stimulation. One thing that- Is really apparent at this event is that it's four rings indoors, and [00:15:00] there is no escaping the noise. It's very loud, so the only way to get away is to go outside, go sit in the car. And when I did that for myself on Saturday, I was a completely different handler.
I was totally back to normal, so that was a fantastic reminder to myself to have a better balance overall and to take care of myself mentally. The timing errors and strategy errors, you know, I'm always looking to improve my timing with Sprint, um, knowing when to give a physical cue and a verbal cue, when to slow down and speed up.
All of those things I am continuing to finesse, and the strategy errors just come down to, like, did I choose the right plan? And sometimes, like 85 to 95% of the time, I did. [00:16:00] But somewhere in that 5 to 15%, I did not, and that's something, again, that I can analyze and look at and take to training to give myself more information and more evidence that I do have the right strategy.
There were also some surprise faults that happened that were not on my radar, and they showed up, um, more than one time during the weekend. So if a surprise fault happens one time, I can very easily laugh that off because my dog is not a machine. She is a living, breathing individual with her own ideas, and she is more than allowed to make mistakes.
So when something happens once, no big deal. But these three things happened more than once, and therefore they get my [00:17:00] attention. The first one was random threadle wraps. Sprint, on three different occasions, looked at a sequence and decided that instead of going in the direction that I was cuing, she was seeking out the available threadle wrap on the opposite side.
So she was essentially flicking away from me when she should not have been, and this particular, uh, fault, I have seen this specific grabbing a threadle wrap, like, one time before when she was a novice, and I did, um, assume back then it was a little bit of confusion.
She wasn't 100% sure where she should go, and she's good at threadle wraps. She likes them. They're easy. They're reinforcing for her. Uh, so when it started happening again at this event, I was a little b- I was definitely confused and [00:18:00] surprised by it, but also it was obvious that I needed to go back into training and remind her about when a threadle wrap is available to her and when it is not, and I'll talk about that in a few minutes.
The second surprise fault was her teeter faults. Um, last November, she did have an issue with a teeter at a trial where it scared her. She fell off and some of her fear behavior reemerged, but I spent, you know, the winter putting money in the bank for the teeter, and the couple of trials that we did before this event, her teeter looked great.
I spent an entire three-day trial just doing FEO and putting a lot of [00:19:00] money in the bank for good teeters, and I thought, "We'll be set," especially because at this event, the Gallican teeter is used, and that is historically her favorite teeter with the best performance. But none of her teeter performances were ideal to me, and they only got worse as the weekend went on.
So that does tell me that I need to put even more effort into making this clearer and easier for her. And then the third surprise fault was leaving the weaves early. Again, the first time it happened, I kinda laughed. I was very disappointed when it happened because it resulted in an E on a f- amazing run, but I laughed it off because she's not a machine.
And then it happened two more times in a run the next day, and so that really [00:20:00] did surprise me. It confused me a little bit. It had me questioning some things, wondering, you know, i- is she sore or hurt? Um, and I didn't believe that, but also when something- surprising like this happens, it can be difficult to stop those kind of spiraling thoughts.
Um, I had no other indication that she was sore or hurt, so I continued with the weekend as if she's not, and I still believe that she was not sore, nor was she hurt. Um, so these surprise faults got added to our training plan for April and continuing through the rest of the summer because I want to fix these things pretty immediately.
I want to make [00:21:00] sure that when I go to the next event that I care about a lot, that these things don't show up again. And the other things I'm always trying to improve and continue building our skill set. But these surprise faults, I don't want them to turn into bigger things that show up regularly, so they're getting a lot of my attention.
So going forward, these are the things that I am focused on, and a little bit of an update, since in April we did attend two trials that were much lower key. One was a local AKC trial, close to home, smaller rings, AKC courses, so a very different skill set. And we also traveled to Utah for the UKI Classic.
So slightly bigger rings, slightly more complicated [00:22:00] courses, a lot more running for us both. Um, so I was able to collect, uh, quite a bit more data. However, I didn't do as much training in April as I wanted to. I over-committed myself to work projects and things like that, and also it was still pretty wet.
But we are now entering summer, and things are glorious, and I am really looking forward to doing so much training. So these are the things that I have been focusing on and I will continue focusing on throughout the summer. Her left turns did get worse over the weekend at the Invitational, but we are continuing to address that from a fitness and conditioning standpoint.
I don't see this, again, as something that she's mentally fatiguing or physically fatiguing throughout the weekend. I see this as we have a limited number of turns in [00:23:00] our bank account, because they are more difficult for her physically and mentally, and the left turns are harder for her than the right physically.
So if I use them up, They go away, right? So if she starts out a we- out, uh, at a trial, you know, adding the appropriate amount of strides before a turn and she's following the handling really well, I have a finite number to use, and if the courses use them up really early on in the weekend, I might start to see them get worse towards the end of the weekend, and I need to adjust for that better.
Obviously, I'm focusing on her teeter, and the information that I did gather at the April trials does tell me that it's fragile, and it's making me put an even bigger amount of effort into fixing it. So rather than [00:24:00] doing what I have done in the past to repair it, I am looking more closely at a complete retrain.
This retrain isn't going to stop me from competing, but it is going to stop me from, you know, getting too fussy about it in competition I'm hoping that for this fall, the new behavior will be ready to debut. So at the trials coming up, I will probably help her manage her current behavior and potentially start doing some FEO to introduce the new behavior as it is proven ready to me.
But considering how fragile it is, I am committed to doing a deeper dive into retraining it rather than repairing it. I did do one or two sessions to build [00:25:00] confidence in not threadle wrapping, so really diving into the stimulus control, even if an obstacle is available to threadle wrap on, even if I'm deceling, even if our proximity takes us near that jump.
You have to have the physical cue and the verbal cue in order to threadle wrap. So this means I'm putting money in the bank for bypassing jumps, for rear crossing, for backside wraps, for coming in close to me and turning with me, and making sure that she understands that all the conditions must be met for a threadle wrap and not just some of them.
I am happy to say that it did not show up at all during the April events, so it is possible that the little bit that I've already done has cleared up a lot of things for her. I am sharing, um, this [00:26:00] process in my Fans of FX Agility community, so I encourage you to join and ask me questions about it over there.
When I left the event, I was really sure that popping out of the weaves was a one-off issue. Like, it just was a thing that was happening, and it was more of a coincidence that it happened in two different runs, but it was potentially, like, two different reasons for why she popped out. But since my plan was to just put money in the bank for weaving with extreme handler distractions, I was actually able to find a situation where she is popping out consistently in training.
Now, this situation is not one of the situations in which she popped out at the invitational. When I did the exact same things [00:27:00] that I did at the invitational, she was never popping out of the weave poles. So- While I still may think that her weave pole issues in Chicago were a one-off, I was still able to find an actual problem that I believe is a problem.
So that has been great that I am able to work through that specific issue as well. And I will resume our running dog walk training in hopes that we continue moving in the correct direction. So even though three strides is probably easier for her, she is still working out the right balance for four strides, and I will continue doing what's best for her in training and then collecting the data in competition.
I would like to invite you to follow along this process of analyzing competition runs, making training plans, testing theories, [00:28:00] and then seeing how that looks at the next competition. And I am posting analyses of all of my runs and the follow-up training to that in the Fans of FX Agility community.
I will drop the link to join in the show notes, and I hope to see you there
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, I really appreciate some feedback. You can leave me a review, engage on social media, or share this with a friend. I hope you'll be back to listen to my next episode. In the meantime, you can find all of my offers on my website, fxagility.com. Happy training.
