The Days of Johann, an agility dog!

Eric at AgilityVision has been super kind in putting up videos of the finals runs from the winners of the 2009 AKC National Agility Championships. Great runs! Click here. And thanks Eric!!!

If you are on Susan Garrett's email list you probably received this email this morning. Susan has a friend that is doing her PhD studying injuries in agility dogs, and she needs our help.

Kim Cullen has put together a survey for any of us that have participated in agility. It doesn't matter if your dog has suffered an injury or not, in order to get good data Kim needs to hear from everyone! Here is the link for her survey

If you want to read more about the study or find out more about Kim, check out Susan's blog today. Just a note: Kim is a top competitor in agility, as a Canadian Nationals Champion with her BC, Recess, and as an alternate on the Canadian IFCS World Team.

Being an agility dog that has received a couple of injuries in agility during my short three year agility career, the data and information that can potentially be gleaned from this type of survey is very important to me. And sensing from the Google and Yahoo searches I get on dog agility related injuries nearly everyday, I believe it will have significance to many of my readers as well.

So we encourage you to participate if you enjoy the love of agility. We took the survey this morning, and it only took a few minutes for both me and Gracie.

BTW - the dog joints and ligaments image in this post is available as a chart from Dogwise.

It wasn't easy, we had lots and lots of entries, but I sniffed out a winner for our Marley & Me DVD giveaway late last night.

Are you ready! Drum roll please!!!!!

The winner is....

Rocky, Bear and Angel LacyLuLu (who will get to watch from heavens above with her family)! Big, big congratulations to the Hudson Furkids!

I sure hope they have lots of tissues, they are gonna need 'em.

If you didn't win and want to see this once in a lifetime movie, it's released today in stores and online. Here are the links for the Single Disc Edition, Two-Disc Bad Dog Edition, and the Three Disc Bad Dog Blu-Ray Edition:


And thank you to every peep and pup who entered! You all all winners in my book :)

Here's Olga Chaiko and Yankee, the 26" winner, despite a missed DW contact. Missing the DW isn't their usual, if you want to see their amazing running DW, check this out!


Here's Jean LeValley and 3-year-old Speck. Despite a few bobbles in this final run, they finished up in 11th place. Definitely a pair to watch for the future.


This is Denise Thomas and Zippity, third place finishers in the 24" category.


And last for now, this is Angie Benaquisto and Dylan (a pair I run up against quite often in my neighborhood), and winners of the 16" class at the AKC Invitational. A great run, very well handled, they are an awesome team!!! With this run they finished up in 5th place.

So, after a couple of sessions with the plank on the ground, we were very pleased with the results.

Here's a little recap: Since I already have a running contact, it wasn't difficult to get me to run across the plank. The difficulty came in making sure I didn't jump the yellow, even with the plank on the ground. BOL!

To do that we varied the placement of the reward target out from the plank. For me, we brought it a little closer so that I could see it better, focus ahead, and drive ahead. Once I was running 100% and driving to the target (didn't take but a few runs), we inched the reward out further from the plank to make sure my speed was the fastest going all through the run. It worked great.

For Gracie, Mum had to give her more independence, to make sure she ran the plank, crowding her made her run around the plank. That worked well. And Gracie ran through the plank with the target at about 10 feet or so consistently.

So, once we both had been at about 100% for many reps, it was time to elevate the plank. Now remember, we don't have a dog walk, so to elevate, Mum utilized the patio that Mum built before I was even born.

The nice thing is that out from the patio there is a nice gradual slope in the yard. Even better for this situation. So she propped the board at the end of the patio creating about a 1.5 foot slope. And she put down a non-skid rug on the patio to give us some grip. This slope really was the beginning tell tale in how both me and Gracie would stride through the yellow.

You'll see I hit the yellow right in the center, a great placement. Gracie however, strides through only hitting her back feet in the yellow, and sometimes just barely getting in the yellow. She has a much longer stride than I. We decided after viewing many other vids of larger dogs doing running contacts that we may have to work on Gracie's striding through the yellow. Not to alter her stride per se, but to help her understand to run completely through it.

Right now, we're treating it as a wait and see. But we have a plan to alter her stride if need be. To do that we are going to vary the placement of the reward target out from the plank, like we did with me.

Also, Mum started varying her placement as we ran the plank - moving out on either side, running with us, standing still, etc. Making sure we continued striding through the yellow. Worked great.

So for now, you'll see in this vid both of us with the plank elevated for progression #2. Enjoy!


This is the second in a series of posts about re-training my running dogwalk contact. You can see the first post here:

Johann & Gracie running dogwalk retraining - progression #1