Ep 68: It Takes as Long as it Takes
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[00:00:00] If you train, compete, teach, or simply love the sport of dog agility, you're in the right place. Hey there, I'm Megan Foster, creator of Fostering Excellence and Agility. Join me as we explore training, communication, handling, mindset, and all the little details that help build stronger and more confident teams, both in and out of the ring.
Whether you're just getting started or working toward big competition goals, this podcast is here to support your journey with your individual teammate. Let's get started
Welcome back to the podcast. Sprint just turned five i- in May, and that means she has wrapped up her third anniversary of competing. She's been competing in agility for about three years, and so I want to unpack a question that I get fairly often, and it's about how do we, [00:01:00] you know, speed up the process of becoming a team?
How do we go from a young team just starting out to, you know, consistently reaching our goals, leveling up, running more clear rounds? Like, how do we do that, and can we make it go faster? For the longest time, I have been telling my students that it takes about three years to grow and develop into a team.
Because those first three years, they are still kinda adolescents, young adults, uh, the first three years of competing, right? So, you know, maybe they start competing when they're a year and a half, two years old, and, and they're still adolescents. And then as they move into young adulthood, they are still changing.
Their bodies are still changing, their brains are still changing, their worldview is still changing, and how they feel about agility is still changing. What they know about agility is still changing. [00:02:00] And so those three years, those first three years of competition, things can be changing rapidly. And this can sometimes sound like a bummer when you've already spent two years and what feels like a really long time just getting to the point of competition.
A lot of people that work with me want to just skip to the good part, right? We wanna skip to running clean all the time, title, getting the titles that we want, qualifying for the events that we wanna get to. You know, we as humans who want to compete have these outcome goals in our minds, and we want them.
And I am sorry to give you this very unsatisfying answer, but I hope that, you know, throughout the episode, I can also give you a little bit of direction and hope for how to streamline this process as much as possible. Teamwork takes time. There is not a whole lot we can do [00:03:00] to skip the process of developing and growing and changing.
We all have to go through the same process of learning how to sequence together, learning how to compete together, learning how to get into the zone together, right? Because it's not just they know the agility skills and you know the agility skills. There's also the competition skills, the mindset skills.
There is a lot to develop, and that's why I kinda use this three-year average. I call all of these things that we need to develop and learn the Clear Round Rule Book, and I break this down in my mindset class inside my membership, uh, but we're gonna talk a little bit about developing this Clear Round Rule Book So obviously we are seeing dogs that are less than five years old being super consistent, um, [00:04:00] l- large number of clear rounds, um, winning events consistently, you know, qualifying for events, attending big events.
We see it. So it can be streamlined. Absolutely. Right? And so a few things that go into streamlining that, when we see dogs that are younger than five, um, really excelling, we can assume that the handler's experience is probably pretty high, right? They, these handlers know what to train and when to train it without having to block off the time to go to a lesson, ask an instructor or coach, look it up in their online content.
They can go straight into the training session, know what to do, know how to do it Handlers with this type of experience also can troubleshoot without a lot of extra time. The troubleshooting is happening as the problem occurs. There's not a whole lot [00:05:00] of having to, like, the same thing, having to sit, plan, talk it out with someone.
Sometimes everyone gets thrown a curve ball that needs a little extra planning, but the more experience a handler or trainer has, the more streamlined the training sessions are, period. Right? And that is not the case for the majority of people competing in agility. The majority of my clients are not professional dog trainers, right?
I assume the majority of my listeners here are not professional dog trainers. There has to be time to look up what needs to be trained, how to train it, get feedback on it. That automatically will make this process take a little bit more time, which is why I've kind of gl- uh, developed this average of three years, because this is a reality.
Um, the second thing that [00:06:00] can streamline the process is your resources, your access to equipment, your additional time to plan, do the training, review the training, your access to coaching and feedback and how long that takes to then develop a new training plan. So just resources alone makes a huge difference.
Um, also, you know, where I live, I can compete in agility every single weekend if I wanted, but that's not the case for all locations, um, in the country and North America, in the world. So that is also a resource that is different for each individual, right? Um, the dog's mental maturity is a big one here Um, do I know dogs that are completely mentally and [00:07:00] physically ready to go at less than two years old or around two years old?
Yes. But in my nearly 30-year career in this sport, I've only had one, and sh- and that was Shock. She was mentally ready to go at around 18 months. She was really solid in the environment. She was solid with other dogs. She was solid with other people. She was super solid. She did not have, um, any arousal-related behaviors that I had to address, like with her brother Smack.
Um, but also, when I debuted her at less than two, she did not have all of her, her obstacle skills trained because her body wasn't physically ready to have all of her obstacles trained by the time her brain was ready. So even though she did debut before she was two, she was only running in classes without contact obstacles.
[00:08:00] So we still needed that three years, because then we needed some of her competition time to still catch up with her training skills, right? All of my other dogs, um, were closer to two or at least two years old, and Sprint is the first dog I've debuted in agility where she knew all of her obstacles. They weren't perfect.
They weren't, um, fluent in all of the situations, but they were very functional for competing at a starter's level local event. And the fact that she had all of her obstacles at two years old was because of my experience, because I knew how to train all the obstacles. I knew how to troubleshoot as things happened.
Um, I... Basically, her entire agility, uh, education as a youngster, I had the fantastic resource of training with my agility [00:09:00] wife, Sarah Stremming. So even if I didn't have the answer right in the moment, Sarah usually did. So I had a lot of things going in my favor, and she was still two years old when she debuted.
So- I say this to, like I said, give you a little bit of perspective and hope and kind of direction of, like, agility is hard. There's a lot that goes into it, and we can't be stuck comparing our individual situation to someone else's because there's a lot involved in making this game successful for each individual team, right?
And we can't skip it. It is a part of the process. It is a part of what makes agility exciting, I think, is that, you know, each team provides different puzzles, different things that they need to learn, different things that come up and that we need to [00:10:00] address differently, and that's what's exciting. But I also recognize that it can be frustrating to think that, oh my gosh, we're not gonna have it all together until they're five.
That's a long time. And it's, it's not really that you won't have it all together. I'm saying that it can get better and better and better, right? Don't think that whatever they are at three years old is what they are forever. I'm saying that you have longer to develop this teamwork and still have a really satisfying and enriching agility career with your dog
So f- before I kind of break down more of what goes into this process, I want to share some stats that I found really cool to track and look at and think [00:11:00] about from Sprint's three years of competition. One thing is for certain, that I find that this three-year rule guideline estimation has held up really true for me and Sprint.
We are not, you know, out there running clean every time. We're not winning everything. We're not, you know, w- we're st- we still haven't cracked open all of the outcome goals that my very human brain wants to focus on. However, I am really good now at predicting what she needs, and I'm getting better every day at executing what she needs, right?
We have a lot fewer surprises, and that feels really good. But in her first year of competition, we competed 30 days. So that's 10 three-day trial [00:12:00] weekends, right? Uh, so 30 days of competition, and we had 89 runs. In s- year two, we increased to 37 days of competition, and with that, we bumped to 103 runs. And in her third year of competition, we had 43 days of competition and 143 runs.
So that kind of gives you some ideas of how often I'm competing to kind of test where we're at and make new training plans and use that data to push us forward. So total to date, um, if my math is correct, it is 110 days of competition in a three-year time period with 339 runs. We've had 59 clear rounds from all of those events, and that [00:13:00] includes local AKC competitions, AKC ISC competitions, local UKI, um Three West Coast Opens, two Canadian Opens, and two 1TTC UKI Invitationals.
And that's about a 17% clear round or Q rate. Uh, when I did this math, it was surprisingly higher than I thought, because the story I tell myself is that our clear round rate is much lower in general. And, um, that's where data can really help us because we can get stuck on how we aren't achieving the outcome goal.
But when I actually look at the stats, I'm like, "Oh, well, this is actually kind of normal," right? Especially when I think about the types of courses that I run and how fast she is and [00:14:00] how much I've had to learn about her and develop together as a team, 17% is way higher than I expected. So this is fantastic.
I don't have those stats broken down by year, but that is something I'm changing, um, starting year four and continuing on. So I will be able to track the growth a little more, um, granularly as we move forward However, I'm still more interested in how the overall performance is improving, not the paper outcome.
Because I can definitely say that we're way better today than we were three years ago. So it's mostly important to focus on the process and how your overall performance feels rather than how many clear rounds or Qs or ribbons that you are managing to collect. Because when I think [00:15:00] about Sprint as a puppy, I wasn't even sure she would be able to compete in agility.
And so the, these first, definitely the first year was mostly focused on can I create an experience that is positive for you in competitive agility? Can I maintain the quality of life and welfare that you deserve in the body and brain that you have, and make a solid career out of this? And then in years two and three, the focus sort of shifted into, okay, how can we improve together as a team?
How can we start chipping away at some of these human outcomes that I care a lot about? I don't care more about them than her experience, but I still care about them, and I think that that's okay to accept and say out loud. So the stats show me that [00:16:00] each year she was capable of a little bit more. I was brave enough to enter a few more runs each weekend.
I was brave enough to enter a few more competitions each year. I was brave enough to go to different big events and more big events. I was brave enough to fly her, things like that. So the data helps me see that part of the progress as well So even though I had a lot of experience coming into training Sprint and competing with Sprint and just competing in general, she's also the fastest and most powerful dog I've ever trained.
And she came to me in 2021 during a pretty significant shift in this sport. So the skills that she needed to learn were very different than the ones my previous dogs needed to learn. And so some of those skills, it was the first time I had ever taught them. So that definitely [00:17:00] slowed the process down compared to other teams.
So I'm just trying to drive the point home that we're all human, that we all have to go through this process, and there's still no way to skip it, okay? It takes as long as it takes, and again, comparing to someone else's situation is going to bum you out and waste your time. I pro- I promise. So even if it looks like someone else skipped the process completely, and they've just shown up and they're perfect magically, I can pretty much guarantee you that's not true.
I talked about it earlier in the episode, there are ways to streamline this process, but there's no way to skip it So let's talk about that process Plan the training, do the training, review the training, repeat. So plan the training. What goes into planning the training for you? [00:18:00] Is it already in your brain?
Can you immediately hop out into the training space and make that training plan happen? Or do you need to consult with somebody, consult an online class, make notes, review materials? What does planning the training look like? You cannot skip that. You have to do the physical training, right? We can't, we cannot skip training the dogs.
We cannot skip training ourselves. We have to review the training. This is usually the piece that gets skipped, is that we do the training, and then we forget about it. We don't look at the video, maybe we didn't video it at all. This is really missing out on how we can move your needle forward because if you don't review what happened and take notes about what happened, you are likely to either not progress in the next training session, you're likely to just repeat the same session again, or you could be, um, [00:19:00] lured into making it much too hard much too quickly, and then having some setbacks because of that.
And then we have to continually repeat this process. We cannot turn this process off. Um, we are never done training. Okay? The same thing can be applied to your trials. You have to plan the trials that you are going to attend, and if you're like me, you're planning them very carefully so that you have time in between those trials to train and make adjustments.
You're, you're being careful that your trial time is not taking away from your precious training time. You have to go to the trial. You have to do everything in your power to have a good experience, maintain your criteria, collect the data that you need, and then come home and review [00:20:00] that data. Again, this is the piece that's typically missing.
We go to the trial. We say... and we focus on, you know, how many cues we got or if we got the title, but we're not actually looking at the data that's in the runs, right? So you have to review the trial because that informs what you need to be training. So we do really have to focus on that review process.
If you're not able to follow the data, you might be doing too much training or too much trialing. So if you're not, um, giving yourself time to review and follow that data accordingly, it could be that you're using too much of your time training or trialing, and you haven't given yourself time To review and process that data.
And I can... Like I said, there's no way to skip the process, but you can speed up the process [00:21:00] by having quality training experiences. You can speed up the process by having quality trial experiences. You have to slow down to be able to focus on your team's strengths, your strengths, your dog's strengths, and your team's weaknesses, your weaknesses, your dog's weaknesses.
It's three different categories. You have to be able to play to your strengths and train your weaknesses. Your ability to predict your dog's path, plan, and execute that handling strategy has to be a main focus of trialing, and you have to slow down in order to do that. You have to slow down and take the time to review and make the plans and do the mindset work about sticking to the plans.
This is critical. You have to slow down and focus [00:22:00] on your ability to execute handling maneuvers. Even if you were able to save something, you have to then review that data and look at why you needed to save it in the first place, and is this part of a bigger pattern or was this just a fluke? Is this something that you need to work on?
You have to slow down and focus on your dog's ability to follow the handling, respond to cues, and execute the obstacles. Again, even if the, you know, the weaknesses are not causing you faults or they're not causing you to not qualify, you have to review the data and focus in on that, because that's where future problems are lurking
Slowing down and focusing on these things means letting go of outcome goals while you focus on improving the overall performance. One [00:23:00] way that I did this is that I chose some big events that I was interested in, but they were open events, so I did not have to qualify for those events. So I knew I could attend them regardless of how I spent the year competing and training.
And that way I could focus on improving the performance overall without this external pressure of, "Oh, but you need this outcome." Slowing down and focusing on these things means changing the balance of training to trialing, potentially. If you are trialing so much that it is taking away from quality training time, and you're also not seeing the progress that you want, this may need to change.
Also, if you're training so much and never testing and never seeing, you know, where you can improve, where you can grow, you might need to take [00:24:00] six months and shift that, right? You might do a cluster of trials, gather a lot of data, learn what you need to learn, and then shift back into training, especially if that's what you enjoy more.
That's kinda how I function. I like to train more. Um, I love competing, but I know that I love training more, and I know that Sprint loves training more. So if I can push my competitions kind of closer together or at least give myself a lot of training time in between competitions, I feel like our process is better overall, and we're both happier for it.
It also means giving enough time in between trials to address the things that need thoughtful and effective training. So this goes into, um, shifting that balance. So just giving yourself more than four days in between events can dramatically improve your results. But if you [00:25:00] are competing Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and you only have Monday through Thursday to rest, recover, and address problems, let alone live your life, make sure that they also have a life, and conditioning, and everything, might not be serving you.
Okay? There is no way to skip this process. I think I've said that once or twice already, but I will say it again. But you can make it more enjoyable and effective for your team with the right approach. And the right approach isn't going to be obvious for everyone because not everyone's situation is the same.
However, if your current process isn't working, you're not satisfied with how competing feels, you're not satisfied with the rate of progress, I would like you to consider, are you following the data? So are you giving yourself time [00:26:00] to review your training, review your trialing, and letting that information guide your next steps?
Is your training focused where it needs to be? And are you following an effective training process that fits within your training style, values, and goals? When you're at trials, are you fo- focused on the process or the outcome? And is your trialing to training ratio in the correct balance? Take some time to evaluate and make some necessary adjustments
I'd love to hear what you think about this episode and how the process is currently working for you. So I invite you into the Fans of FX Agility free community to join the discussion and tell me all about it. Thanks for listening
Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to leave a review, [00:27:00] share it with an agility friend, or connect with me on social media. Your support helps more handlers and teams find the podcast and be part of this community. You can also find all of my training programs, coaching, and resources at fxagility.com.
Remember, excellent agility is built one training session at a time, and every small step forward matters. Until next time, happy training
