Clean Run - August 2017 - 30

Throughout my time in the sport of dog agility, I have taken a passionate and competitive approach
to training and competing with my dogs. Lessons in mental attitude and mental game have since
followed, and continue to greet me at both expected and unexpected moments. Often these are lessons in failure,
frustration, success, mental toughness, and mental vulnerability.

Sense of Self
The Bad Session
By Tori Self

Think for a moment about your worst
agility run ever. Got it? Me too. Got a
couple? Me too. And probably, like my
worst runs, yours are not exclusive to
competition. All too often it is our training sessions that bring about our worst
moments in dog agility.
But practice makes perfect, right? Then
why, after years of disciplined and determined practice, are we not yet perfect?
At the very least, why have we not yet
mastered the training arena?
Answers to these questions are not always clear. Sometimes we can point to
poor training discipline, other times to a
lack of adequate coaching. But even the
best of the best make mistakes, evidence
that perfection does not necessarily exist. Is it for good reason?

Breaking Down
You ate a complete and balanced breakfast. Your dog saw the physio last week
and is feeling good. You have been eating vegetables all week, getting enough
sleep/protein/sunshine, and you even
completed all of your workouts. It is a
beautiful day, not too hot, not too cold,
no rain, the sun is slightly masked by a
few friendly clouds, and you're up at a
reasonable hour for a training session.
Everything goes wrong.
30

Or at least it seems that way. Bars keep
falling no matter how early your cues
are, while your contacts have fallen to
pieces, and you can't remember the correct course to save your life.
Another day: you slept through your
alarm and managed to leave behind
all of your homemade dog treats on
the counter at home. You have a nearly
ripped in half dog toy on hand and no
spares and, naturally, you are hitting
every single red light on the way to your
session. The actual agility starts and
again, everything goes wrong.

circumstances. Emotional response in
a situation like this is not a bad thing,
nor is it always even preventable; on
more than one occasion I have found
myself tearing up when things refused
to click. But giving into surface-level
anger should be avoided where possible, especially because we work with
dogs as partners. We must commit to
our responsibility of care and respect,
even in these moments.

Handling It

When we mess up we have a tendency
to find someone to blame. Depending
on your history with the world-your
training, so to speak-you might
blame yourself, or your teammate, or
your coach, or or or... Certainly when
something has gone wrong in our lives
we should look for the "why" behind
it, the function of the event. Understanding this will give us the ability to
make changes to positively affect future
events. Unfortunately we often narrow
this "why" down to the fault of another.
But if we can isolate the function of a
problem without blame we are likely
to reach a more accurate, effective, and
compassionate conclusion.

We have a few different options when
we find ourselves in the middle of a
downward spiral. Often we choose
to feed the situation further, growing increasingly upset by the negative

There have been many training sessions
I have felt were impacted by training
partners or other people, whether it
was a delay in starting, disorganization
in how the session was run, or poor at-

A bad session can present on any kind
of day, the same as a good session. But
regardless of the kind of day, The Bad
Session is the one that sticks out for another two months in your mind, haunting you and testing your confidence. If
everything went wrong then, why should
I think it could ever go right at an actual
event? This type of session can be incredibly demoralizing, and in the midst
of feeling dejected, it can be diﬃcult to
know how to respond.

Clean Run | August 17

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