Look mom! I'm a real agility greyhound!

School has been insane. I want to keel over and die I'm so exhausted and frustrated. The weather hasn't been helping either. It's mid April and there's still the odd day where it snows! And when it's not snowing it's rainy, windy, and COLD. Not good weather for working on agility. I did take a couple of slightly nicer days to work with Summit in the backyard, and I've been working with him on our morning walks to the park. There's a couple of playgrounds with platforms to use as tables as well as some big logs (for the kids to walk on?) that have some good height that I've been asking him to jump.

Finally got some videos yesterday in the backyard. I set up a makeshift jump out of a stool and some buckets and one of my broken hockey sticks (I knew I kept that thing for a reason). I started off pretty low, asked him to jump that a few times, and then made one side of the jump a fair bit higher. He still had the option of taking the low end, but as you can see he could easily clear the high end if he wanted. I've got him on his harness and long lead because he's associated the backyard with zoomies. The harness seems to keep him focused, so we will continue with that until the backyard comes to be associated with working.

There's also a big piece of plywood in the backyard (I think it's left over from the backyard rink that was there in the winter) and I pulled that over top of a rock. It doesn't work exactly like a teeter but it'll get Summit used to walking on a surface that moves. The point was more just to get him on and off of it comfortably as opposed to really walking from one side to the other and tipping it.

We also had our second agility class last night. We learned the chute which was no problem for Summit. I was quite surprised. After how much he balked at the tunnel at first I was expecting some sort of resistance, but not a problem. We started it out short and almost open, then slowly made the chute longer and started collapsing it down. In a few tries it was full length and completely collapsed. No problem. We also started working on the A-frame with a target at the end, and finally we worked on the teeter. It was set up with one end on the table so it was basically just a plank that didn't move. Summit was a little unsure about this at first but he's definitely getting better. I had my agility instructer take a quick video at the very end of class. Unfortunately she missed the jump, but you can see him go up the teeter. She also told me that next week if I want more videos she can take some during the class, so hopefully there will be many more next week!