Since last week, when I put out the idea that you all should run out and get five weave pole and contact challenges from three elite agility handlers, some of you have come to the conclusion that I should provide you with the actual challenges to try. You guys are cracking me up!  Okay lets recap, I outlined the program, I promised to help you to improve your weaknesses once we out line them and now you want me to give you the actual challenges as well?

Aaaaah no, nor will I come to your home, set up the obstacles or run your dogs for you either:). There is coaching that is provocative, inspiring and challenging and then there is spoon feeding. The later is not my style at all, but kudos to all of you that tried:).

If you want to take part in the $5 Challenge, you need to do the leg work yourself. Here is what I will do though. I will facilitate.

I am not suggesting you all email Greg Derrett for your challenges but he certainly is one of the many qualified elite handlers that could contact.

I am not suggesting you all email Greg Derrett for your challenges but he certainly is one of the many qualified elite handlers that you could contact.

I will encourage anyone that has a challenge to post it here. Those of you that go out and gets a challenge from others ask for permission to post them publicly. This will be our first Pay-It-Forward event of the year.  You will be not only helping yourself but helping all those that read this blog. Just post your findings in the comments section of this post under a title identifying it as either a “Weave Challenge” or “Contact Challenge” and share what you found Ideally it will be in the format of CRCD (Clean Run Course Design) or in a pdf, gif or jpg.

Who to contact?  I did suggest you contact seminar presenters (not including me:)) or other elite agility competitors. There must be at least 30 – 50 people out there doing agility seminars right now. You can also look at former world team members and don’t just think Large Dog Team members either. There are lots of talented handlers that have represented their counties in the small and medium dog classes (can you tell it annoys me that of all the 30 the seminar presenters out there that that you can name, likely no more than 3-4 are small dog handlers— and it has nothing to do with the talent level of the small dog handlers!).

If you can’t get any of these people to help  (we must be at well over 200-300 people now) go to your favorite venue’s homepage website, look up the list of judges and email one of those to get their toughest challenges they have ever put out. Now if within this pool of 1000 or more people you still can’t find someone other than me to turn to for help, go and look at your old course maps that you have saved and find the sequences that has stumped you over the last year.

What’s that? You don’t save those course maps? (my European friends, you are exempt from this exercises since I know you don’t get course maps)  Those old course maps are a great source of improvement –so a good New Years resolution would be to save them AND use them. Review/improve your challenges and weaknesses by going back over these course maps.  Okay what if you have never trialed in agility so don’t have any course maps. There are lots of judges (especially the European ones) that post their courses on their own website.  So start googling!

As a coach I like to see some initiative, an internal drive from my students (and I have adopted you all as my students– in one way or another), to get out there and show me some hustle while they are waiting to be hit by their next training epiphany. Now get out there,  find your challenges and then come back here and post your findings. Either post the individual “Contact” or “Weave” challenges or post the websites where others can find course maps.

Today I am grateful for everyone that is out there collecting challenges to help each other in the drive to save five bucks.