Nothing to report...

It's been a dead zone lately as far as agility trials go so we've just been concentrating on training. River has been awesome in class, such a good boy. Ruby has been great as well. She's back to her loud, speedy self in class and has had awesome 2o/2o positions on the DW and teeter. Her DW speed is also back to where it was before the pee incident in Lake St. Louis. See below:

If you look up 'mortified' in the dictionary next to it you'll see this picture: http://kevin.zenfolio.com/p902518968/h34bc0d39#h27c2f5f3

Kurt has been awesome in helping me make Ruby faster. She's fast as it is but using my voice can help her turn more quickly and makes her much more responsive. We still have a long way to go with making her turns tighter. Mostly it's my timing as we really haven't been in Excellent that long, only a year, and she's gotten considerably faster as she's learned to love the game. At home I've been training both of them on end position with the travel plank my dad made me. I can lie it flat or pull the legs out and it mimics the angle of the end of the DW. Right now it's the pups fav thing to do (can't beat anything that involves lots of cheese! :)) We also work one-jump stuff every day in the basement and whomever gets left upstairs to wait their turn throws a very vocal temper-tantrum!

I've also been doing some strengthening exercises with both of them for their rear. River I'm not too worried about as he has an explosive jump and his little legs are very muscular for such a young pup. I can't wait to see him do some dock diving this summer - should be a hoot! I'm mostly working on stretching his sides so that he can turn more evenly. He turns great to the right but not to the left and he had some issues doing that on the DW.

I have class with both dogs tomorrow night and I'll try to get some video of River. I've been teaching him the rear cross and he's been doing great crossing from my right side and switching to my left but going left to right has been a little hard for him. I don't know if it's due to his having a hard time turning to the left or if it's something that I'm doing. I did eventually get him to do a rear cross but it was more of a flip, like they showed in the "Pigs Fly" article in Clean Run this month and I had to help him quite a bit. I also could only do it on the flat, where he was having no problem doing the right turn rear cross over a small jump. I'm going to have Dana look at it for me tomorrow night.

We have two days of trialing at the IKC Show in Chicago this weekend and I'll update on that as well. I've entered Ruby in the FAST class this time and I'm hoping we get at least one leg. That would be nice. =)