Sunday, December 23, 2012

Happy Holidays!

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 


Saturday, December 22, 2012

Waiting for someone to drop food!

Starbuck - waiting for some food to fall

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Starbuck's latest agility adventure!

Starbuck had some one on one time with me at a local trial. I usually travel with the whole crew but sometimes it's fun to give Starbuck some special time.

Here is one of my favorite pictures from the trial:


Yep - that's me and Starbuck! Notice that I am running in my work clothes! I had to work that day so my trainer was running her for me. I got out of work and showed up at the trial right as they finished walking Time 2 Beat. I didn't even have a chance to change so I ran her in my work clothes with my hair flying everywhere - and we won!!  



Starbuck has some killer A-frames - she just hovers over the apex lands at the bottom of the blue and does one short step into the yellow and then she's off! 

Here video of a couple of our runs:



Doesn't Starbuck have the cutest butt? :) 

Well, hope everyone is enjoying December! 

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Dog Agility Blog Event Day - Backyard Training

Okay - I cannot figure out how to join the Dog Agility Blog group (http://dog-agility-blog-events.posterous.com/pages/backyard-training) - stupid Yahoo Group errors!

But I'm going to blog about Backyard Training anyway.

So.... my yard is basically a very large hill. We're talking about a 20-30 degree steep hill. This means there is no way I can do agility in my backyard. The only training I can do in my backyard is to let the dogs race around like crazy which helps with their conditioning.

The other agility training I can do at home is tight jump wraps in my basement. We have a room that is 20'x20' - really not big enough to practice any speed but I do have two tiny jumps that I made and a tunnel so I use the tunnel to work on jump wraps.


While I can't do that much agility training - we can work on conditioning at home! I have several different exercise balls (round, peanut, donut, paw pods) that I use to build up the girls muscles. And I add in some fun tricks to work on coordination and teaching the dogs that failing is not a big deal.

Here's a little video that show some of the conditioning work we do along with them racing around in the backyard:



Anyone have any other ideas on agility stuff that one can do without having a yard?