Monday (Day Ten) OK, with the success of Saturday and weaving 6 poles, Monday was a consolidation day. The first session of the day I had the first and last poles opened up slightly. Enya was running well so I closed the weaves up again. I would say no problem, but that's not quite true. If she came in full power she was skipping. If she came in at a steadier pace she was picking up all the poles perfectly. Also with the poles closed up she's not paddling. These are minor issues to my mind. The big thing is she's gone through the "lightbulb" moment with the weaves.
What do I mean by the "lightbulb" moment? In a lot of the things we teach our dogs to do, especially in agility, there is a moment when your dog clicks to what it is your trying to get them to do. Up until then their just doing things by repetition or giving you a partial behaviour, but they don't understand what it is your asking them to do. For the weaves, virtually all the methods we use to train them rely on a set of parallel poles that are gradually closed up. This applies to channels, V weaves and to 2x2s. The lightbulb moment occurs when your dogs understands that your not asking them to run down between two rows of poles, but your asking them to weave their body along a single line of poles. That is the lightbulb moment.
For the mid-afternoon and evening sessions I concentrated on working the arc with the weaves closed up. This allowed me to make sure Enya was still able to get her entries into the weaves even when closed up.
Tuesday (Day Eleven). OK, for the morning session I shifted from three 2x2 weaves to a solid base of 6 poles. Although we've been working with closed up 2x2 poles up until now, there is a subtle difference between those and a solid base. 2x2 poles can move independently of each other even when staked down. A set of poles on a solid base do not behave like that. Fortunately this did not make any difference to Enya's performance.
An interesting thing to observe with Enya's training in 2x2 weaves is the amount of value that have been built into them. The slightest twitch in the direction of the weave poles causes a small, red try-colour blur to run through them :-)
OK, technically this is actually day twelve of training. If you look back through the entries of the blog you'll see that we had a Day Three And A Half when we were sorting out a problem. And we've had two rest days so this is exactly two weeks since we started Susan Garrett's 2x2 Weave Training DVD. The reason for all this finger counting is below:
Yes, my little star did 12 weaves today. You really can do 12 weaves in 12 days. Actually this was almost an accident. I hadn't intended to do 12 weaves today. In the 2x2 method you first master 6 weaves and then you add a second set of 6 weaves 12ft to 15ft away, and then move the two sets together. The problem I hit was Enya was so keen to do the second set that she was skipping poles on the first set in her hurry to get to the second set. During the training we've have managed to build a lot a value into the weaves. As it was the last session of the day I thought, What the heck - let's just put the two sets together and see what happens".
What happened was a bit of magic - Enya did 12 weave poles.
OK, now we've got over the initial euphoria, lets examine this. Two weeks and we've gone from a dog that had never seen a weave pole to a dog that can weave a set of twelve poles. OMG! However there is still a huge amount of work to do. Her weaving actions needs to consolidated, entries need to be checked, obstacles on entry and exit need to be introduced .... but she is weaving :-)
And on that happy note I shall leave you for now, but watch this space for more updates.
