Clean Run - August 2013 - 41

active participants in their training.
Shaping also builds resilience, she explains. The puppy learns that if something doesn’t pay, no worries, he can just
try something else. “I am not particularly
creative or fancy in my trick training,”
she explains. “I just want the dog to have
success offering a variety of behaviors.
Currently, I am really into any body
awareness tricks such as putting four
feet into a small bowl, using the FitPaws
Paw Pods, and things like that.”
Eventually some of the tricks that the
puppies are learning may relate to agility, such as going through the uprights
of a jump. “It honestly depends on my
schedule. Synner is my middle child,
nearly five. But his training got put on
the back burner when Scream made
the world team in a year I didn’t think
he would make it. The youngest is two
and knows the equipment and how to be
a partner, but he hasn’t really started to
play the game yet.”

Personal Training
When training her dogs, Ann focuses primarily on handling and skills such as con-

August 13

| Clean Run

tacts and weaves in isolation or in short
sequences. She makes the most of her
training by planning what she wants to
accomplish ahead of time and then aiming for short, efficient training sessions.
“I do little full coursework unless I am
preparing for a big event,” she explains.
“I feel it is a more efficient use of my
time to work with my dogs rather than
spending the time building courses.”
Heading to the 2013 AKC Agility Nationals, for example, she concentrated
on some remedial reinforcing of contacts
and weaves poles with Scream, who she
describes as “a well oiled, polished dog.”
With Synner, who is not as experienced,
she worked on more handling. “He has a
particular weave pole entry that is hard for
him. I will typically select a skill or two
that I think my dogs are in need of maintenance on. You know you will have contacts on every Standard course and weave
poles in every course. You can break your
handling into similar categories: 270s,
serpentines, sends to the back of a jump.”
She also considers the venue in which she
will be competing. She didn’t work on a
lot of threadles, for example, in prepara-

tion for the recent AKC Nationals. On the
other hand, the first time she was headed
to the FCI Agility World Championships,
she built international-style courses to
run, only because she and her dogs had
very little opportunity to run on courses
of that style.
In training, Ann adheres to the principle
of less is more. “I believe there is a point
of diminishing returns and a point where
the risk/benefit ratio needs to be taken
into consideration. What I mean by this
is that there is a point where the risk of
injury for the dog or handler, in terms of
a pulled muscles or such, outweighs the
benefit of ‘just one more sequence or just
one more set of weaves’ in training.”
She also believes in letting the bad training sessions go. “I learned many years
ago that just because you have a lousy
training session or, for that matter, a
lousy competition, it doesn’t pay to
dwell on it.” That lesson was learned in
2004, when she had a miserable USDAA
competition with Spree, now retired, and
was questioning the wisdom of traveling
all the way to Arizona for the Nationals. “Long story short,” she says, “Spree

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Clean Run - August 2013

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