Clean Run - May 2017 - 34

Dog Agility
Spring Makeover Recipe
By Laura Hartwick, illustrations by author

Spring is here! Or at least it's on its way. We're finally emerging from the winter doldrums, when dog agility loses its gleeful, shrieky joy to damp, chattering teeth and puffy mittens
that fail at dispensing dog cookies. Over here at my house, on
the far most left side of the USA that you can be on without
falling into the sea, our perpetually sunny oceanside hamlet
was overcome this year by dark shadows and gloom. It felt
like we'd gone back in time, to before there was light and reason. We resisted, but every so often you get a winter where it
feels like you just can't win.
This year, our new climate change normal
of so-hot-it's-a-drought got brass knuckled in the teeth by the new old-normal
of pounding, oppressive walls of mud and
rain. The dogs didn't care. I did. At some
point, pulling on perpetually mildewy rain
boots again for a mud slog just at the
moment it looked like the storm would
break but that turned out to be the exact
moment when the storm didn't break and
didn't break the most when we were the
exact farthest away from our house, made
even a walk seem, just so, daunting. The
sad, mopey, pudgy face of January. We grew
weary. The dogwalk is covered in ice and
there's nowhere to put jumps that isn't
mucky, undrained swampland. Mostly there
are trudge-through-mucky-puddle hikes
and walk-around-on-leashes-at-odd-timesof-day between cloudburst outbursts. Only the brave few who
bring jumps in the house and can fit a teeter-totter in the hallway get to practice. Dog agility goes on a backseat ride while
we stumble along wetly in the dark.

And then, peeking over the horizon comes the hopefulness of
longer days and a brighter sun. The promise of spring.Yes, we
can. Do some training.
Training gives us hope. The golden road to a better life
through perfect weave pole entries on a backward angle coming in on the soft side from a straight tunnel 20 feet away. Or
just fixing things that went wonky that you mentally bookmarked back in the fall-maybe that weird spinning thing, or
the start-line behavior that went horribly feral.
Substitute in jumps, teeter, dogwalk, A-frame
as needed. Fixing things we have control of, it's
the promise of a new day. No one's standing
over us while we train, holding us by the choke
chain and telling us what we can and can't do.
If we can imagine it, we can make it happen.
Me and my dog can get that collection turn
away from me even tighter, get that push to the
backside to happen when I feel like I'm a mile
away. Oh yes, we can.
We have power when we train. There might
be head scratching for a minute, then marching
back onto the training field with a pocketful
of string cheese, a rubber cow milking udder,
and a new plan. Scrappy revolutionaries we
are, each and every trainer whoever said to
themselves, "I'm fixing that stay, sit, down, turn,
contact, poles, whatever, now." For real. Forever.
Oppose and resist.
Some of us are better fixers than others, for sure. But the
whole point is, when the steam of This Is Unacceptable Behavior and We Can Do Better starts puffing out our ears,
we channel it into an atmospheric river of optimism, of grass
roots hope and vigor, and using a lot of brain cells to find a
Clean Run | May 17

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run - May 2017