Radical Canines

This past weekend, Rugby and I were lucky enough to attend a freestyle seminar with Jack Fahle. This was a solo trip for Rugs since Ryder and Rumor stayed home. Despite camping in the brutally hot/humid weather, it was a great weekend! I always enjoy going to seminars like this because not only is it an opportunity to learn but it’s so much fun being able to just hang out with my dog people and talk dogs all weekend!

The cool thing about seminars and freestyle ones in particular is being able to see the game through someone else’s eyes. Jack has a style to his freestyle that builds off of flow and connection. As he said, nothing he does it particularly big or difficult, but the way in which he combines moves makes it difficult and unique. Watching him play with his dogs is like a fun dance with discs.

When I reflect on my style with Rugs, I feel like we have lots of stuff but don’t always have the prettiest or most varied transitions between our stuff. This weekend we worked on upping the level of difficulty on our zig zag while promoting catches and adding in some fancy flow. The biggest take away for me this weekend was to take a beat. Sometimes I get so caught up in just going to the next thing that I forget sometimes slow is fast, and adding in a pause is a good thing because even though that pause feels like its 5 years long it’s really only half a second.

Jack also had some really fantastic ways of teaching trick throws and then immediately going into how to incorporate them in a way that will allow the dogs to be successful in catching them. I’m excited to work on our tweaks this week and put them on the field in Michigan next weekend!