Tweaking the Turn

I've added a twist to our backyard practices to give one last tweak to his turns before we head to the championships. Zio's turn has progressed a LOT from the first tournament of the year. The most improvement came from using a gutter to push him the right side of the box.

The downside of his turn is that we didn't use the jumpboard too, so he was tending to get lower and lower on his turns. For the last few months, we've done everything with the jumpboard in place. Zio did some of his best ever turns during the practice before the last tournament in Bonham. Unfortunately he didn't hold it as well as I had hoped. I think once the prop is removed, he tends to revert back.

I was trying to come up with a way to minimize the props and came up with a way to use old 10" jumpboard that's just about as wide as the box and painted white. The logic was that if I lay the board against the box, it appears like the taped portion of the pedal. I thought that after a few times of poor traction on "the white", he would learn to stay above the white. Unfortunately or fortunately, he's never touched the board. He's been high on the box every time I've used it. It could be that he can visually distinquish it from the white tape, so I won't know until I take it out again. In the mean time, I'll be hopeful that it's teaching him to stay up on the box.

Final Warmup Tournament in Bonham

Fresh back from our final warmup and we have four weeks to be ready for the championships. Although the weekend started out rough by revealing that we still had not resolved some old issues, we worked through it and have a workable plan for the championships. I really think the new running order will work out best for the championships.

The new lineup is Zio, Cody, Wisp, and Jean-Luc. Daniel did a great job moving Wisp to the third position as he quickly got in the groove of passing again. Jean-Luc seems to be doing much better by starting closer and using Susan's patented water-boarding training technique. Zio did pretty good on his starts as I learned where the magic start position is located. He was feeling very racy and I eventually ended up back around the 62 foot mark. Cody's speeds dropped after the first few races, so we are hoping he isn't injured. I know Michele felt bad and was pressing pretty hard, but I think he just needs to rest up.

I think the dogs need to do some recovery this week and we'll get back to practicing twice a week soon.

Speeding Sheepdog Practice

Three of the Speeding Sheepdogs got together mid-week for an extra practice session at the field. This gives us the opportunity to work on full runs with a standard run back area that we can't do at CSA. Here is a video from the past Friday.