Clean Run - June 2011 - 72

Your goals are a commitment to your training, and they need to be in writing. Writing them down indicates you are serious and gives you an inked witness to your plan. Remember, these goals should be reasonable, measurable, timely, and honest.
organizing Your Training Plan & determining objectives
How do you organize your training time to fit it all in? Often, it goes like this: you sit down, you design a plan. You use a flow chart that incorporates all the training and handling you want to work on for the next few months. You execute this well-thought-out plan. You feel good, your training is going well, and then you have a “trial with new problems.” When this happens, the most important concern is often automatically moved to the top of the training list. While you may continue to pursue a weekly or monthly schedule to review basic handling, foundation jumping, weave entries, and contact behaviors, the trial problem is added as an organized daily training set, and, suddenly, everything else is good enough; only the current problem merits the full force of your attention. To reconcile this difference in importance you place on your training sets, you need to determine your objectives. You may have a handling goal for yourself, and a training goal for your dog. (A trial can be a way to measure how well you are meeting these goals, but you may want to consider that it not be a goal in and of itself.) Remember: It is best to formulate goals based on what you have the power to change or what you can influence. This gets a little tricky because there are many characteristics about your dog and yourself that you cannot control: however, you can control how you compensate for some of these. For example, when setting goals for jumping, you cannot change how tall your dog is, and thus you have little say about what height he is required to jump in competition. You can control the organization you choose to compete in, which will affect your jump height choices and your weave spacing. You cannot control your dog’s conformation, which may affect how he jumps or how he weaves, but you have the ability to develop his fitness and you can use sound training methods to teach your dog how to use his body. You can control how you teach your dog to focus on the task you are asking him to do. You can’t control your own genetic capability to sprint, but you can increase your foot speed, and your ability to think and react on course with proper coaching and TAG teaching. You can’t control whether you win a class; other teams may do better or worse than you, and you have no power over them. You can only do your best. But you can improve how well you execute your handling maneuvers and how well you mentally manage competition. Your goals are a commitment to your training, and they need to be in writing. Writing them down indicates you are serious and gives you an inked witness to your plan. Remember, these goals should be reasonable, measurable, timely, and honest. Let me digress a bit and talk about honesty in training for agility. If the current wisdom is that a running A-frame is desirable, but you don’t want a running Aframe, don’t train a running A-frame. It doesn’t matter why you don’t want a running A-frame. “Why” is irrelevant except as a discussion between trainers. If you are not especially fast, but can jog along at a reasonable pace for your dog, admit that and train yourself to keep moving smoothly. Train your dog to read cues, con72

sistent with your system, at speed. Be honest that you are not going to be racing around with the alacrity of a college track star, but don’t let that limit you. Honesty means assessing your team’s strengths and limitations, capitalizing on your strengths and pushing the boundaries of your limitations. It doesn’t mean lapsing into complacency because you carry a little too much weight, are older than other competitors, never took dance lessons, never used a clicker, and “can’t get there for a front cross.” Honesty is not capitulation. It is setting reasonable goals with reasonable expectations, training to achieve these, and then setting the bar a little higher.

What’s Good Enough Today May not Be Good Enough in a Year
When something is good enough, it succeeds in meeting your standards most of the time. You know you have accepted good enough on a start-line stay if you want your dog to sit, and when you lead out and look back, your dog is often standing and leaning forward. No, he hasn’t moved far from the original sit, he never (well, almost never!) leaves until you release him, but it wasn’t the sit you envisioned as the perfect start-line position. Still, you release your dog and run the course. It was good enough for you. It fell within your tolerance level for your dog’s behavior. You may even know you will have to accept the occasional break, but you feel you have better things to spend your training time on. For now, anyway. Good enough is mutable. It is a snapshot of a behavior or ability at a given point in time and is not necessarily sufficient for the rest of your time in agility. It is a successive approximation of your end goal. Let’s say the start-line behavior described above works for you for a year, but then you see that your dog is breaking more often or stepping forward more than one step, and this is not acceptable to you. The behavior has destabilized and you enter training triage. It has now become worth your training time to reinforce the start-line
Clean Run | June 11

Clean Run - June 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run - June 2011