Agility Update

I have mostly been posting about Rundle's progress in obedience but we are still working on some agility stuff as well.  Rundle thinks agility is a lot of fun and he is doing well with all the skills we have been working on.  Rundle is still learning all the foundation skills and has seen very little in the way of actual agility equipment.

There is so much for him to learn before we get to the "big dog" stuff. Rundle is learning to take a straight line of jumps without me cueing each individual jump.  He is learning the 180 jump pattern and can now do this with a fair distance between the jumps. Rundle also knows how to take the backside of the jump on cue.  We are working on running across planks on the ground and Rundle thinks this is very exciting. He has pretty good coordination for his age and can stay on the plank even running at full speed (I'm sure this will give me a heart attack when we move to full sized equipment). We have worked a bit on rear crosses but I need to do more of this outside of class so that he really understands.

The only full sized piece of equipment Rundle has been learning is the teeter. We started doing teeter bang games (Rundle jumping on the end of the teeter to make it "bang").  Now Rundle has started running up the teeter to the end with the teeter propped up so it can't fall. Rundle gets fed standing on the end up in the air and then I lift him off. He has no problem with this at all. Last week he mis-stepped and fell/jumped off and turned and got right back on again. So he is not at all worried about the teeter so far. Soon we will start moving the teeter up and down a bit and have Rundle "surf" on the end of the board.  He still has a long way to go before he is doing the teeter all on his own, which is fine with me as I am in no rush with him. He will probably be in the foundation class long after the puppies who started the same time as him move on to the more advanced classes. Rundle, being a large breed puppy, will not be able to physically (or mentally) move to more challenging training or full equipment until his growth plates are all closed, which will not be for quite a while still. So, there is no need to rush anything - we have lots of time to work on all the basic agility skills we will need.