Well last night we had a Fun Run that was supposed to be "tryouts" for the upper level classes at my agility club. Well, Gus stunk the place out! He was so hyper that he could not focus on anything.
The course map is shown to the left. I lead out past the first jump and ran past #2 to perform a front cross to get him into the correct side of the tunnel. Unfortunately he completely ignored the turning cues and headed directly into the off course side of the tunnel. He then proceeded to knock the bars at 4, 5, 6, & 7. Rather than take the dogwalk he went off course to the #16 jump. Once he was back on course at 8 he did pretty well through 13 but when I pushed myself to get into position for a front cross on the landing side of 14 he pushed out around the jump. I am pretty sure that my forward body motion prevented him from seeing that jump. Anyway, once I got him back into position for the #14 jump he took the obstacle discrimination perfectly (one bright spot) and then start to herd me through the difficult path cross area from 15 to 16. At that point I was just too frustrated to continue so I pulled him off of the course. Due to lightening we were unable to get a second run, but I did put him on the teeter twice (between other people's runs) and he did the aframe/tunnel loop a few times before we put away the equipment. Those were both very nice. He had good contacts and the teeter was fast but well controlled.
In Gussie's defense he had not been to agility class at this location for over a month so his focus was way off due to the excitement of being back at this location. I also could not work on his focus with me because a number of people had questions for me and that was distracting. I need to be better about focusing on him during these pre-run periods and not allowing others to interrupt his time.
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