Well I’ve been occupied. I’ve had it in my head for at least a couple years now that I should write a distance training manual for small dogs. Over time—using my web-log for a focus for writing discipline—I honed and refined many of the concepts and exercises that are intrinsic to my accord of distance training in dog agility. And yet I had a hard time staring the project from the POV of a cohesive content plan.

I had an epiphany! It occurs to me that there is fundamentally no difference between training the small dog and training the large dog. The concepts are the same. The exercises and methods and objectives are identical. And so the conception of writing a specific conduct for the small dog is flawed from the onset. Little dog people will tell you that their dogs have to receive more strides between obstacles; they move slower; they are tiny and don’t have the speed and impulsion of their larger cousins.

I find that any training objective begins with a mission statement and you might say the will to prevail. As often love not the little-dog person will spend more power explaining why they can’t achieve the distance training mission than they actually do working on the distance training mission. Aye there’s the rub.

And so I return to the drawing board free of the shackles of the misstated mission. The size of the dog makes no difference.

And so what I’ve been doing for most of the past week is developing a workbook based on my own lesson plans. I’ve been living like a bear in the basement thumping on the keyboard and referencing hundreds of short articles I’ve written on distance training and handling.

My objective is to publish a distance training workbook on a monthly foundation suitable for instructor-led lesson planning or as a reference to the back-yard agility enthusiast. I figure that behind about a year I’ll have written (and rewritten) most of what I understand about training a dog for distance job in agility. This week I just wanted to give it a good start.

I have a bit of editing to do yet. And I want to do my usual technical thing putting the project in a .zip file so that the reader can click on any of the course maps and spawn it into the Clean Run Course Designer. That little detail alone represents 8 or 10 hours of work.

I’ll let you all know when it’s available. I figure by January 1 it will be good to go.

As a handling exercise this simple sequence is more hard than it looks. As a distance exercise it is considerably harder than it looks.

Sometimes the solution to a distance challenge when constrained by a handler containment line mightn’t truly be the best handling solution if there were no constraint to movement. In the workbook I also intend to study handling challenges in which a distance handling solution is the most elegant.

Which is correct of this sequence?

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston: BudHouston@hughes.net. And Check out my latest publication the Just For Fun Agility Notebook #30 available on the Country Dream Web Store.