Yet another day of training

Back-chained on the dog walk from the top of the up plank. There was one rep where he stopped in a handstand and literally stayed there for half a second, hahah. His other stops were beautiful, though. Just a couple more sessions, and he'll be running over the whole competition-height DW and stopping in 2o2o!

We've developed a routine in our training lately: first we train the DW, then we run a sequence, then we finish off with something easier. So, predictably, after training on the DW, we ran a sequence. This one had a 45 degree on-side weave entry at the beginning and then some fast lines of jumps and tunnels. Wall-e didn't even see the weaves at first because I'd set him up in the direction of a jump, which he raced over to and tightly wrapped. I set him up properly the second time and he hit his entry perfectly...then saw the DW and snagged it! I let him run over it because we were going in that direction anyway...when he got to the down plank he jumped off and zoomed towards me. Apparently, he'll need some more work to have his target faded! :) He did an AWESOME finish of the sequence -- he put one huge stride in between two jumps where I would have expected him to put two; and he sent into the tunnel with me catching up behind, not even glancing at me as he happily took the obstacle.

When I set him up to try the beginning of the sequence again, he spotted a car driving by and chased it halfway across the field, then turned on a dime and zoomed back to me without me even saying a word!! Next he spotted a TRUCK. (If you ask Wall-e his opinion of which vehicles are the most fun to chase, he'll say the bigger the better.) He took off for it, but again came back to me right away. It's as if he's thinking, "Whoopsies, I'm not in the backyard, I'm at the field...s'posed to be training right now!" GOOD boy!! Anyway, when we actually got around to trying the beginning of that sequence around, he saw the DW, but came right to me when I called him. He's way too good.

Finally, we practiced Susan Salo's set-point grid. I did this a lot with Wall-e in his jumping foundation, but he haven't trained it in quite some time. The grid has 2 jumps; the first is 6" and the second is 10", his current competition height. Wall-e jumps the 6" jump and then takes off for the 10" jump as soon as he lands from the first jump (a.k.a., a bounce stride). He jumped with so much power! He did launch himself once, but usually jumped very nicely.