Club championship

You can't put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get. - Michael Phelps

I was so lucky to be asked if I could be the judge at my clubs unofficial championship in 2013. Since I have interest in judging perhaps want to pursue judging, it's good for me to learn and I also get to think about the lines that the dogs need to take.

 

I view the entire thing as another step in my learning process to becoming a capable competitor, and I find it interesting at the same time.

 

The courses I built can be seen below:

Agility 1

Agility 2

Agility 3

Jumping 1

Jumping 2

Jumping 3

  I also wanted to run in the championship, thus giving me the last two "competition" races before this coming weekend. Due to my nice little ankle injury, it didn't go so well. My head was on the judging, and things just was loads of fun and running :P

But, hopefully the weekend will be superfun with great company and lots of interesting conversations about agility and subjects around this..

As a good friend of mine says;

Work hard, Play hard!!

 

Tommy & Leija



About me :)

Hey there :)
I am currently a 27 year old man who like to spend my time thinking about agility, family, sports and having a great time.

I currently work for an oil-service company, spending my days looking at equipment and computer systems for dealing with the oil offshore business.

In my spare time I normally spend my days with my lovelly family, consisting of the wife (of course), twin boys at the age of three years, and two Schipperke-female from the lovelly breeders Carola & Risto Ojanperä & Johanna Stolt. Check out their website, www.coros.fi.

We have our own breeding name; Ikoria, but we haven't had any litters yet. Hopefully we will manage to get our oldest female with puppies winter 2013/2014. We'll see how things turn out.

Check out our webpage at www.ikoria.net.

We started with agility the summer of 2008, with borrowed dogs. Actually it was Elisabeth (wife) who went on the course and I was just a spectator. Luckily we had two dogs, so we both could start at the same time. We were both bitten by the bug, but we always had to keep in mind that we competed with someone elses dogs. This made us look for our own line that we wanted to continue with.

The winter of 2010 I travelled to Finland to pick up our first female, Coros Miracle (Leija in common day). It happened to fall on the worst snow storm of a century in Finland, and Leija was able to get in some serious social training after being stuck at the airport in Helsinki and Oslo for over nine (9) hours.

We started our agility career as a team the spring of 2011. We were both hooked and Leija was something out of the ordinary. With a speed and drive beyond anything I've encountered, we had our challenges set for us. After spending a better part of two years getting our cooperation together, we've finally started to stabilise our runs, making it in to grade 2 in the first three competitions of 2013.

Picture by: Åsta Viksøy

The future for Leija and me will be to work our way up the system, and then hopefully we can try out for the national team and show the world that we will have fun, no matter what the stakes.

Keep reading the blog and follow our progress. We'll talk again :)

Tommy

Competition practise

 

Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy. - Norman Vincent Peale

 

I had my first solo-training in almost eight months. The is plenty of downsides to training alone, if you let them control you, but for me the most difficult with training alone, is that I can't get my runs on video, since I don't have a bracket for my mobile phone.

 

 However, that doesn't prevent me from having a great time during practise.

 

Below is the course I built last wednesday that I used for practise.

This week there haven't been alot of training due to family matters and other things coming in the way, but wednesday evening I played a soccer game with the company team that ended bad for this weeks training:

However, today the foot is feeling alot better and my goal is that I still will compete in next weekends competitions in Bergen.

Have a great weekend and remember;

Happiness is not decided by how others view you, it's how you view yourself.

 

Tommy & Leija

Complacency vs Consistency

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. - Andy Grove

 

During once progress, one can easily become blind of the smaller things when you're training. Because of this, I've found out that it can be good to run fun, straight forward courses to focus on the "easier" things that I need to work on. I like this alot better than to suddenly come in to a situation during competition where I encounter things I've never seen as a problem before, basically to prevent complacency.

I believe complacency is one very dangerous aspect of all sorts of training. You put in alot of work teaching your dog the basics in the beginning of your "team-career", but after a while you think that it is something that is "natural" for the dog. I would say that you are 100% wrong in this way of thinking.

One example that I can give you, which I got from someone I think myself close with during my time in the military, is around this aspect. Imagine your entire dog training base as sand castle. You spend alot of time making the castle strong and dependant, and it looks that way after a while. But as time passes by, weather and the elements starts to deteriorate nad the castle crumbles bit-by-bit. Picture yourself putting down all the work to start your career, making the basics feel like this:

And then you train more and more on the technical stuff, but also becoming more frustrated every training because the dog "cheats" on the basics, like the "stay-command" or the contacts. Maybe the dog cheats in the weaves where you know deep down that you have perfected in the beginning. However, if you keep ignoring these issues and brushing them away as a "bad training session", then things will only escalate and in the end your sand castle will look like this:

But then again, it's a matter of perception. Some people don't want to spend time to focus on the minor things, focusing more on getting through the courses or rising in grades. And I have nothing against this way of thinking, but I would rather continue focusing on the basics and getting the teamplay and teamwork between dog and handler very strong, and trying to maintain it. Thus removing the entire idea of having a problem with complacency.

It is all in the mindset of the handler, getting the correct focus and disregarding the negatives that might come from competition and too much overthinking and over-focusing on difficult scenarios. My mindset is being more and more travelled in controlling the negative thinking and getting my head set on having fun, finding positive focal points in all of my runs and not even trying to "ease" my way into the destructive mindset that can easily come from DQ'ing or doing mistakes in training and/or competitions.

But I will not appear as a holy grail of positive mindset. As you can see from the video below, I still need to improve the timing in my handling.

For me, this is a perfect course to find the "complacency" issues I've mentioned above. The timing issues for me in this course is the sections where I have to do a front-cross without breaking Leijas stride and making sure she doesn't jump over the same obstacle on the way back. Also I move too soon after the weaves, forcing Leija to skip the last weave and I have to do that section again.

But my most important thing to take away from this is THE SPEED!!! Look at the SPEED !!! O-M-G!! I LOOOOOOOVE IT!!!... This is what I just love about this dog... She is my little speed-baby :D  Can't wait for the next competition and for our training stay in Finland.. We're going to ROCK!

Have a GREAT week and think about what I've written above, as this is not just valid for dog-training, but for all training or way of life.

 

Tommy & Leija



Front cross problems?

Expect problems and eat them for breakfast. - Alfred A. Montapert

Things have been going forward very much the last few weeks, and I am sure people is starting to be sick of reading about it as well. But when Leija and me have experienced so many challenges the last two years, it's always good for me to show off that things are improving, at least in the rate I feel it's going.

We are so lucky to get external advice from great agility athletes and trainers, and after a nice Skype-conversation, we got a "few" points to work on:

1. One of the biggest things; I need to stop turning my body towards Leija when she is coming down from contacts. Somehow I think during my handling that it would be a good thing to stop her during the contacts by turning my body. However, this is a BIG no-no from me. I need to stop this movement straight away.
2. I bend my body too much in turning movements, making Leija react the wrong way to my handling and also giving her way too much turning radius then what she really needs. When I get my body straight, she reacts quicker and her turning becomes sharper.
3. My movement during front crosses go too much in the wrong direction and too much sidemovement instead of getting the correct movement towards the next obstacle.

The last few days we've trained some more on courses and just having fun. The below videos are from our last two trainings. The first one is a Class 2 course which we had great fun with.

This video is a partial from a front cross training course I got from my external trainer, Seppo Savikko. It's a front cross course from a different world, and the "bad" thing: this was only the first eleven obstacles. Obstacle #12 is only put like that to get a natural end to the course.

But as you can read from below, even though you fall, you pick yourself up and keep moving forward!!

Even if you fall on your face, you're still moving forward.

Victor Kiam 

So now we will have one last competition in June, to see where and what we need to focus on for the summerbreak. It's going to be a good experience :)

You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else. - Albert Einstein

Tommy & Leija

Training progress

"Confidence comes from discipline and training. - Robert Kiyosaki"

It finally seems like we are getting some stability in our training. We (Leija and me) have continued our focus on basics, like weaves, contacts, speed and motivation, and it seems like it is working. Atleast for the time being. I know that the technical stuff is there, but I don't "need" it at the moment. Of course, our turns and focus can be improved and everything can go alot smoother, but after 2 years of struggling with this "shit", I see that we are doing so much better with focusing on the fun-part of agility.

After a week of quiet training and not really pushing Leija too much, we had an unofficial club competition yesterday, with one agility and one jumping course. It went beyond all expectations, but I think and believe that is 100% because my expectations was to just have fun.

Below is the movie from our agility run:

There is always stuff that can be improved in a run: Here the turns could be alot tighter, my body movement needs to drasticly improve and speed could be faster. However, it was a cool course, and my main focus on all training is to have fun :)

Course details; 164meter, time 39,97, clean run, 4,1mtr/s

The following link is our jumping run;

This run was abit slower, but I put that on taking her out too soon and that we only had 14 min break in between the agility run and the jumping course.

Again, I'm happy with us having fun and I see that we have some stuff to train on, but heck; what are we using training for if we are not finding out what we need to focus on?

Course details; 147 meter, time 39,37, 5 fault, 3,73mtr/s

 I wish all of my readers a good week and weekend, and hope you will keep following me :)

Tommy & Leija

Stavanger - 10-12 May 2013

In any team sport, the best teams have consistency and chemistry - Roger Staubach

Now we've just finished this weekend's competition. Stavanger-stevnet 10-12 May.

 

This was our first competition this year where we decided to run the team competition also. That gave us a total of nine (9) runs during the weekend. At the end of the third day, this was very clear that it was a few runs too many.

 

I started the weekend on friday morning, taking the judges on a sightseeing trip in downtown Stavanger and for some lunch. It was a relaxing start to a tough weekend.

 

Our competition started on Friday evening, and we had a "perfect" weather for agility;

It seemed that the judges were prepared atleast and Lene Cecilie & me had our tent to sit under. That was a life-saver ;)

 

Friday:

My first run of the day was Jumping 1, with Pertti Siimes as a judge. It was a super cool course, with great lines and alot of speed for me and Leija. Unfortunately we did not manage to finish the course, but I really liked the course ;)

After we finished this part, Leija and me started our first team-run in a year. It was a "schmashing" success :) We managed the entire course with nothing more than five faults, due to me testing something in competition that I haven't tried before; wrong side weaves :) But how can you improve if you are afraid of trying? ;)

In agility 1 it didn't go so well, and both me and Leija were tired and soaking wet....

I would like to have had some movies of the runs, but I was on my own and thus no movies :) Probably the best, as I don't need to re-live those horrible runs :P hahaha...

 

Saturday:

The day started wet. It was raining in waves all day, but that didn't prevent the sun from poking through from time to time. Todays judge was Michel Liekens, from Belgium. One of the strangest things about this judge, was the fact that he had NO COURSE DRAWINGS, what-so-ever.. He designed them during building and then had a small writing pad he drew them on after he was done, so that he would design them when he got home :) It was some GREAT courses, with a few traps and mistakes that I fell for, but 100% handler mistakes..

 

Jump 1:

This was a fun-filled speed course with alot of good speed in both Leija and me. I wish I had a video of this run, because it was a great run, and only microscopic error by myself made this a disqualify.

Agility 1;

After a long day, we finally had the last agility run of the day. I spent a few extra seconds on the contacts just to make sure I got them all, but then again, it didn't look like I had to :)

Unfortunately there seems to be a problem with Youtube and matching videos to my account, so if you would like to watch some of the runs, please go to this address, it will take you directly to my user, where all videos are listed :)

But back to the run; we did great. Finished first with a clean run and the last one we needed to go onwards into Grade 2 :)

After the competition, myself and Lene Cecilie took the judges out for a nice walk and dinner downtown. We had a very good evening, some good food and wine, together with alot of agility discussions :)

Sunday:

This was a great start of the last day :) We saw the sun :) The area was dry and there was even some t-shirts out in the world :)

Jump 1:

If there was ever a time to say almost, this was the run. Both myself and the judge are 100% conviced that if I had been 5 millisecond slower in the handling, then I would have nailed the run :) Atleast up to that point :) Then maybe, just maybe I could start in jump 2 in Bergen, which will be our next competition.

 

Agility 2:

This was our debut in grade 2. As we have trained alot on more complicated courses than grade 1 & 2, this was not too difficult to find good lines and know where to do changes. However, what I need to do in these situations, is give Leija the room she needs to do the obstacles correct. Otherwise I will get these unnescessary denials that we got in this run. Again, Youtube is fu***** up, so please go to this address if you want to see the run.

 

Teams;

Teams on Sunday was the last run of the weekend and it showed. Leija disqualifed herself on purpose, 100% disregarding my handling or actions, ran past my legs and on to the dogwalk. Easy, simple and relaxing for her :P hahaha..

 

All in all I am very happy with the weekend. I reached my goals and I got some stuff I need to work on. Now we have a quiet week with long walks to get the competition out of our feet, paws and minds before we start again next week preparing for the next competition, 21-23 June in Bergen, where the judge will be Manuel Alff.

 

I finish this post with a super good photo by Åsta Viksøy, of Leija and me doing the weaves:

© Åsta Viksøy / Fotolykke

Tommy & Leija