Running contacts, part 2 - The doubt

Once upon a time...


...I wrote about my plans about our contacts with A-frame and dog-walk. Atlast came the time of doubt upon us. And offcourse the issue is running contacts!

We have been working our "behinds" off to make our first appearances at the competitions to be appropiate. I know I have made some tradeoffs because of that and one of them is our RC training!
We have been able to compete officially now for a month. We have competet 4 times during that. Our results have been DQ, 5, 0, 0. So its pretty nice row for a young starting dog. Its something I like to see and have been aiming towards. It has not been easy road. Our weaves have been awfull, still have a lot work in it, our seesaw is risky, some handling manouvers are risky... And we are not talking yet about table, flat tunnel... Urgh. So when I was bitten by the competition-bug, I had to make some sacrifices and sadly it seems Ive been somewhat creedy to be able to compete. (obviously!)

So about my doubt issue in RC.

I have been "trying" to do some courses in trainings and competitions with running contacts.  I have been lucky with them. I have even made myself to do some tricks to make them work (like distracting the dog to make her brake the stride). Some of them have worked and few havent. Ive been getting hesitant with our RC and even started to talk about it aloud. And for what? I have NOT trained them for ages and I presume them to work!

Argh I have been silly. Luckily I have some brain-activity left and I took some time and thought about my issues. I looked after my articles and studies about RC and gave it another thought. These are the things I found out:

•  No RC training since... ages.  -   yeye, Its my ambition about to be able to compete!
• The stage of RC training when I started to be distracted - PERFECT phase 1 of the RC way Im going towards. Why I havent worked towards to phase 2!
• Phase 2 of RC? - I thought that going towards ´weaves, seesaw, flat tunnel, queuing obstacles´ was more important. Theyre "ok" now, so no need to overtrain them
• Training enviroment - Ive tried to convince myself that winter is coming and my ability to train RC is reducing. And even my training time in summer was insufficient...

Well. Thats few things ive found out. Im thinking about quitting RC because I havent even tried to train them :D Someone shoo...spank me!

So, now starts my phase 2 of RC. Wish me luck again, since Ive runned out of luck in less than a year ;-)

Running contacts?!

As everyone knows, there is huge "battle" with running contacts vs. 2on 2off contacts. There are many who say the other and there are a bit less who says about the other. Namely running contacts are a bit underdog in this matter.

In my opinion 2on2off are excellent way to teach contacts: Its moderately easy to train, reliable and you can win world championships and european opens with it.
Running contacts are considered less reliable and the life after dogwalk is usually the argument used against running contacts. But its really fast! You can win up to a whole second with running contacts against perfectly done 2o2o contacts.

I will not go into details about these methods, but I will tell all you why im taking this path im going to take. This is a note and a diary for myself when after few years im pondering "why I started running contacts in the first place..."

1. Physical attributes: Shelties stride is considered natural for doing running contacts. My own running speed is decent or some would say fast. I dont need to stall the dog so I can catch them in the course. Blitz will be mini dog and this also helped in my desicion.
   
2. Goal: Ive set my goal in agility pretty high. I want to take every possible part of seconds out from the clock.
   
3. Reliability: Well trained running contacts are reliable. There will be misstakes in the beginning and this is considered to be the blame why people think running contacts wont work.
4. Amount of training: Running contacts need alot of training. But so does 2on2off! Ive been closely looking at my club-partners who have world class 2o2o contacts. They do ALOT of work for it also. I think the same amount of work can also make running contacts to work. At this moment I will have it easier to train running for Blitz than trying to make her stop :-) I have my own dogwalk and A-frame to train with, now im only missing summer!
   
5. Experience: I consider myself not being novice anymore. So this means I know what I want and I know where to get help if/when needed. If Blitz would be my first dog or less trainable I would definately go for 2on2off contacts.
6. Training-training-training: I will train Blitz to be able to understand commands as "Left, Right, Go forward". Running Dogwalk training does not stop at hitting the contact. I will train the tools to work after the contact. There is allways the option for re-training! If I fail miserably with running contacts, It is considered easy to re-train contacts to 2on2off.

I will update some parts in English so that I can update my friends abroad how my runnings are going!

Wish me luck!