Radical Canines

When everything with COVID-19 started and the world shut down more or less, almost all dog sports were cancelled. We would train on our own but nothing crazy. Competition weekends, especially during the summer, tend to take up a huge part of my time and in the past two years I’ve done almost exclusively disc. I would take a weekend here and there and do dock diving or agility but usually only because there isn’t something going on frisbee wise. This is when our crazy dog sport loving community got creative. Organizations started offering virtual competitions.

The first we did was back in March/April with the UpDog Quarantine Cup, a virtual freestyle competition where you could record your round and submit a YouTube link to be judged. It went okay, getting good video on my own was a little tough and I was happy to have something to motivate me to get out with Rumor. While, I was grateful to have it, honestly, the virtual freestyle option is not my favorite. I feel like so much gets lost from the environment and even though it’s continuing to be offered, I haven’t felt the desire to record and enter. We’ve done a few in person freestyle competitions and they have been great but there really aren’t many of them so I haven’t felt the need to really get Rumor and Rugby’s routines competition ready. With Rugby just coming back this year and Rumor being the jolly green giant he is, I’d rather do other things right now.

Enter agility! Agility is my first love of the dog sports world. I saw my first agility trial when I was 10 when I saw my aunt competing with some of her Aussies. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and knew I wanted to do that with my dog! Unfortunately, it was not meant to be with Rusty, he would do jumps and follow lures in our yard at home but had a terrible recall and some reactivity issues that a 10 year old just was not equipped to handle. I didn’t get to actually start training in agility until almost 14 year later with Rumor. Rumor is lots of fun to run, he handles well, and he’s fast BUT he almost never leaves up his bars. Ryder runs agility and is very honest but is slow and often becomes demotivated by twisty courses with lots of direction changes. So we’ve trialed a little over the past 4-5 years and Ryder has worked his way into Advanced in USDAA and Elite in ASCA but it’s slow going now in terms of Qs (qualifying scores) and moving up. Rumor runs fast and happy but tends to decimate courses, knocking down any number of bars. In agility, leaving bars up is an essential part of earning Qs to be able to move up. Rugby, however, is a nice little agility dog (when he’s not barking at me). He’s fresh and fun to run but we had only entered 2 or 3 trials before he got hurt because he was so young. So he and I have been doing virtual agility and loving it!

We’ve been running the USDAA@Home courses and I honestly like it even more than in person agility trials. For the virtual courses, you are given a 2ish week window in which to set and record you and your dog running the course. You can train the skills on the course before recording, and rerun if you make a mistake. You only pay for the courses you want to run, so while at a typical agility trial I might run 8-10 runs in a weekend, with the virtual I can spread out and choose to only do 3 courses over 2 weeks and not feel like I’m wasting an entire weekend for just 1 run a day. They also offer courses of different sizes to fit a variety of spaces which is great because I can run 40×60 courses at the training center and 50×60 and 50×70 courses at my aunt’s in Vermont.

Our first set, Rugby was entered in Starters Snooker and Starters Jumpers, earning Qs in both. The next set, I decided there really wasn’t a need for him to jump 22″ or do spread jumps, so I dropped him to 20″ performance. We trained at 20″ so I know he’s comfortable there, the 22″ was a bit more work for him and while doable, I felt unnecessary. We’re still waiting on results from our P1/P2/P3 Jumpers runs but I’m optimistic they’ll be Qs as well. Today we ran P1/P2/P3 Snooker. Another thing I love it being able to “bank” Qs. So Rugby and can do all 3 levels and if he earns Qs, they will be saved for when we get up to that level which is awesome! This week we are running all levels of Gamblers in Vermont.