What a cracking day we had! This summer I did a couple of training rounds with Faith but I didn’t feel like I had made the most of them and when I saw and advert come up for this day I jumped right in. I didn’t know who Jo Hill was as I am new to obedience but I figured if she was holding a training rounds training day she must know her stuff and boy I wasn’t wrong!
Start of the day was introductions, we were 8th in the running order and Jo wanted to see what kind of attention for working we already had with Faith and what her drive was like in general, she was happily pleased to see Faith exhibit good drive and some nice attention that we could work with and build on.
After we all headed outside to a ring that had been set up with a judges tent and chairs around the ring. For our training rounds we could have dogs working around the ring, judge wandering and steward giving commands in the background to create as good an atmosphere as possible.
With Faith I wanted to work on set ups but we ended up going even further back initially to work on entering the ring before even working on set ups which was great for me and Faith. On our second go we worked on heelwork and how I could train it in the ring to best effect.
In addition we had some lovely focus on play during the day and how to build the best play/tugging for Faiths level of play, which thankfully were good so we’ve something solid already on which to build.
In between Faith had fun socialising with Dylan her travel buddy and training a little on the field bits that were not in use for the training day.
I’d highly recommend these training days and certainly hope to be on the next to build on what we have learnt, it was a confidence boost for me and a really fun day for Faith.