Day 36 or AKC Nationals Day 1 (ISC)

Good evening. I hope you have been following the live feed from the AKC National Championships. I was busy all day, supporting Leslie and Zoom, coaching clients, cheering Schnauzers, walking 17, 0000 steps, and generally living on caffeine for the past 18 hours. So, after all of that I am here to report that Leslie and Zoom survived and looked great in both of their runs, just a little bit of getting used to the surface and the excitement of the NAC.

The ISC class for the 14 inch class was very interesting and I have all of the video to prove it. I noticed that the leaders all had their own style, but had common attributes. These attributes were the speed and turning ability of the dogs and the ability of the handlers to select (pick) correctly for their team. With this in mind, I studied the videos this evening and see that this is the most important thing we do in agility. If you have the abilities to do your handling and performance management and the dog is trained well, it is the analysis that is the difference. All of the teams that I coached today discussed the analysis at length, not is the dog going to get it's contact or is the handler going to get in the front cross. So, if I learned anything today about myself and what I need for my success at WTT09, it is that I need to get my foundations and specialization areas of my training and handling down to the point that I am not only confident, but comfortable! Talk to you tomorrow.