Proofing

What do you do when you havent proofed your training as much as you thought?....

I thought I had done a reasonably good job of proofing Tooheys weavepoles - different sized poles, different length of poles, different spacings and angles, poles with stripes on them. Now his footwork still needs work, and we havent worked as many angled entries as I would like, but I thought I had prepared him for more than what he would see in competition..

Yesterday was our first night of agility training at North Cray & Sidcup AC . This is the first time Tooheys had trained in a proper class, we had a good time & thoroughly enjoyed the class. All except for the fact Tooheys had seeminging forgotten how to weave. He would hit the entries correctly and then either pop out & look at me, or skip every couple of poles. Now I would be lying if I said I wasnt at least a little disappointed but I was more puzzled as to why it was happening. All I could think of was that he'd lost the muscle memory from having a couple of months off with no training, and that we were training on sand which is a new surface and may have been throwing his footwork off.

It wasnt until we were packing up at the end of class and I picked up the poles that it struck me. 1) The poles were coloured, an 2) the poles were wood (so solid and inflexible). And these are whats routinely used in competition over here rather than white PVC. So we havent proofed beyond requirements of competition after all! Back to the drawing board we go....