LØPENDE FELT

Summary of mails asking about "running contacts" in UK:

 Is it true that many handlers in the UK always make their dogs of all sizes wait in training, but have them run through in a trial?

In UK ultimate speed is required, and they almost have to gamble that the dog will touch the contact as they cannot afford the cost of even a fraction of a second by stopping as that could mean the difference between a first place or a tenth (or lower) place.

Over the last 20 years nobody there has come up with a reliable method of training run-throughs, otherwise everybody would have adopted it. So I am not hopeful that it is possible.

 

 

Jo Sermon:
”Running contacts” in UK – or maybe not
 

It is true that our classes are won and lost by 100ths of a second at the top end and so speed is vital.

 My dog may appear to run the contacts in the ring, but in fact he is pausing, for a fraction of a second and waiting for me to cue him on. If I don't, then he will stop and the pause will be for much longer. In 3 seasons of competition, he has been faulted fairly perhaps 3 times and those were without doubt my fault as I cued him on too early. His contacts are solid and reliable and FAST.

Success failure rates are as they are elsewhere I should imagine, that is variable, entirely down to how well the contacts have been taught in the first place!!
I've yet to see it a reliable method of training run-throughs, I'd like to, but I will not gamble with my dog's contacts. People keep referring to "muscle memory". In my opinion, that refers to unconscious actions such as balance and breathing. Contacts are NOT unconscious and muscle memory does not apply. A dog performing the A frame needs to concentrate and collect to be able to hit that contact and if  he's going faster in the ring than in training, "habit" will not help. A thorough understanding of the job requirements will. The only way that I have found to be reliable is to teach the dogs to stop and carry on only when cued to do so.

 Years ago, hoops were popular for contacts here, they soon disappeared, they are MUCH too difficult to fade and in the large majority of cases dogs are learning to avoid the hoop, NOT hit the contact.

For all those that have a reliable "run through" of all the contacts, could you please share with us your dogs' average performance times on the equipment for comparison purposes? I'm happy to start the ball rolling – my young dog was timed, contact to contact in the agility ring at 1.6 seconds on the Dog Walk.

 I'd be interested to discover how fast these dogs that are "running through" the contacts are, I'd also like to know how many seasons they have been competing and how often they compete.

At the end of the day, it has never been difficult to teach a steady dog to hit contacts. Fast dogs of ALL sizes are a different matter altogether.

Regards,
Jo Sermon and Beardies from Surrey in the UK

                                 

                               

The discussions that followed Jo's mail - revealed that there are very, very few fast dogs around the world which run the contacts successfully. And - most of the dogs which people thought had running contacts, turned out not to have running contacts, they were just cued on as soon as they hit the contacts.

Solveig Trippestad

 

AgilityNet UK, Nov 1999:

"Jo Sermon started her training career with a supposedly untrainable GSD. With him she did working trials. When the dog developed spinal disease, she borrowed her husband's Beardie and took up Agility in 1988. With Buzzy she won four Starters trophies and never looked back.
She lives in Surrey with her ever-tolerant husband Geoff, who says that it is bad enough living with the dogs, never mind training them! They have two daughters, aged nine and eleven. The rest of the zoo is made up the two Beardies, Yogi and Jester, one rabbit, a Water dragon called Puff (that'll teach her to tell the children that they can't have dogs) and a hundred or so tropical fish.

Jo has qualified has qualified for all sorts of finals including Eukanuba and Spillers with her Senior Beardie Yogi. They have qualified for every ABC final to date, and have been invited to Olympia three times, where they have won twice.





In 1995 Jo started Benbow Agility Club with Bob and Wendy Ratcliffe in order to provide the kind of training that they could not find anywhere else. They like to experiment with different methods of training and run training days on a regular basis."
 

 

Solveig Trippestad

www.solveigtr.com