From Scratch!

I didn't realize it had been so long since I had updated this. We had TONS of fun at the Spring Fling Tournament hosted by Hyper-Flight. Zio raced on the Off and Running Team both days as well as running singles matches each day. My little man was exhausted Saturday night and again Sunday night.

He posted new best singles times both days with a 4.686 on Saturday and a 4.583 on Sunday. Racing on Sunday was more fun than I can describe. We ran Izzy, Luigi, Zio, and Violet consistently in the 23 second range. We tied for first, but lost the second tiebreaker (best head to head times) by .016 seconds! Considering that we haven't really practiced our timing on passes with a green dog, we did pretty good! Almost every race was clean Sunday.

The discouraging parts was that Zio reverted back to punching the box instead of using a swimmers turn and pretty much ignored the tug. I'm guessing that he's too distracted by everything going on around him that he loses focus.

Elizabeth, from Hyper Flight, was extremely helpful and talked to us about teaching a wall turn. In a nutshell, train the dog to jump against a vertical surface and push off from the wall (doing a swimmers turn using a wall). They have to turn around and push off very quickly or they would fall to the ground.

To be honest, I didn't really embrace the idea initially. I've spent four months teaching him to turn and he does it great here at home. My mind tried to convince me that he just needed to re-enforce home habits at the tournament. The more I thought about it though, the more I came to realize that after four months of great practices at home... he still wasn't getting better at tournaments. The time to change was now.

Without much knowledge, I started trying to get him to turn against the wall (without much success). He would get his front feet up, but his rear was planted on terra firma. I kept at it for a few days and wasn't seeing improvement. Elizabeth had mentioned that it may require getting a piece of plywood and starting with it almost flat (to get them to use all four legs) and gradually angling it until it was vertical. I didn't have plywood, so I took a chaise lounge and leaned it slightly against a wall. The first time or two, Zio would walk over it and then push off with his front legs. I decided to try a 45 degree angle and amazingly... he leaped completely over it and did a perfect swimmer's turn off the wall!!!! I'll try to get some video tomorrow, but I'm very, very encouraged by his eagerness to bounce off the wall.

I may have an opportunity to go with some teammates and practice with the Hyper Flight team in Dallas Sunday! What a great opportunity to get some training tips and soak up some expertise to share with the team!