Good Trainer, Bad Trainer

Some days I feel like I am pretty good at training Abby, and some day I feel like I need need remedial lessons.

Lately, Abby has been doing awesome in class. She has a ton of energy and we both seem to be having a great time. This most recent class was one of the best we've had in a while. She was off leash almost the entire time (aside from the first exercise which was right next to the row of 11 seated students and dogs). Abby had an almost perfect rally run thru this past Friday too. She pranced and danced and was practically smiling through both runs. Her head was up, her tail was wagging, and she had a great heeling speed. She was flawless. It is at times like these that I feel like I have FINALLY figured out what Abby needs from me as her trainer. We have figured it out together and we are not only have a great time, but we are doing very well.

But then there are the other things. . . the things that make me feel like a bad trainer. I miss signs, I don't know my right from my left, I give Abby cues for other behaviors that she knows which goes completely against what I need her to do, I don't give her enough space when heeling through cones. There are just so many things I do wrong that I am amazed she is doing so well. To be fair to me, most of these mistakes aren't actually training mistakes - they are simple dumb human mistakes.

There are also other things, things I can't quite figure out what is going wrong. That not only makes me feel like a bad trainer, but it also makes me feel like a bad mom because I can't make everything simple and stress-free. The most recent training issue that we are facing is Abby's extreme distance in her heeling during run thrus. Abby stays as far to the side of me that she can possibly be without straining her leash. This is a behavior that we only see in run thrus. We just saw it on Friday, but there was no hint of it on Sunday - not even after I stepped on her toes! The first time I saw it, I attributed it to our higher stress level. But this most recent run thru was much more relaxed than our last one. I went into to not caring at all about our score - which is probably why I didn't pay any attention to the signs - or to my right and my left. I can't quite figure out why we have this very odd occurrence during run thrus; and if I don't know WHY it's happening, I can't fix it. And if I can't fix it, that makes me feel like a bad trainer/dog mom. I also talked to a friend, someone with years of experience on me, who had some interesting ideas about it. But even if she is right, there is still nothing that I can do about it.

I've been giving myself a hard time lately and have felt like I'm letting my team down. It's a far cry from last year when I had all these high hopes and a pretty good ability, but I didn't have a dog that could keep up. But rally is such a great, fun sport, and Abby really excels at it. She is now doing so well that my short comings are becoming more and more obvious. I try to tell myself that I am still pretty good a this - after all, I have been able to get Abby this far. And really, Abby doesn't care if I screw up - she doesn't know how many points we get at the end of the run - her cookie is just as big...