I’ve had this conversation enough times now that I could do both halves of it myself.
It goes like this:
Somebody writes to me, and they’re not lazy and they’re not cheap. That’s the first thing you need to know about them. They’ve done the work. They’ve taken the startline course. The foundation course, the handling course, the one about independent obstacle performance, a mental management thing, and probably two more I’ve never heard of.
And they FINISHED them. Not bought them and let them sit in a browser tab. Actually finished them, did the homework, filmed the reps.
Their dog is beautiful in training. Genuinely lovely. Holds that startline at home every single time, for weeks.
Then they walk to the line at a trial and the dog is gone before they’ve got both feet turned around.
And the email always ends the same way. Some version of: what should I do next? Which online course do I need?
Why the agility startline falls apart at trials
I want to talk about why that question is so hard to answer.
There’s nothing wrong with the online courses. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are mine.
An online course gives you a procedure. Step one, step two, step three, here’s the criteria, here’s what to do if it breaks. And a good procedure is valuable. I’ve built plenty of online courses and procedures, etc., and I’d build more tomorrow. I’m in the middle of developing a few right now.
But a procedure is built for a dog who isn’t there. It can’t be built for YOUR dog, because whoever wrote it has never met your dog. It’s an average. It’s what works for the most dogs most of the time, which is exactly what it should be. It’s also why it can’t tell you what to do at 8:40 on a Saturday morning when your dog is braced on the line, in a building they’ve never been in, with somebody’s hot dog ten feet away.
The procedure is a recipe, but recipes don’t account for where you live, what the humidity is, what your brand of kitchen appliances are, and when it comes to dog training recipes, nobody wrote the step that you need help with in that moment. Nobody COULD write that step.
The insidious thing that we don’t talk about is that when you’ve run a dozen procedures correctly and the dog still breaks, there’s usually only one conclusion left available to you. It isn’t ‘the procedure couldn’t have known.’ It’s ‘I did it wrong.’ Or worse, ‘something is wrong with my dog.’
So you go find the next procedure, the next online course.
And every time you do that, you can get a little further away from the thing that was actually going to fix it, which is looking at the animal in front of you and asking what they’re telling you.
I’m not above this, by the way. I’ll tell you exactly where I catch myself doing the same thing. In the gym. I’ve got a program. The program says what it says. And there are days my body is very clearly telling me something the program has no opinion about, and I will absolutely run the program anyway, because the program is written down and my body isn’t.
Running the plan FEELS like discipline. Sometimes it’s just avoidance with a spreadsheet. 🙂
It’s the same move in a different room.
So what do you do instead?
Not nothing. I’m not telling you to throw out your online courses and freestyle it (although I do think a healthy sense of FAFO is a good thing). A framework is scaffolding, a recipe. It just isn’t a script you should expect to be able to follow exactly to the T.
What I’d do with that startline dog is stop asking ‘what’s the next step in the plan’ and start asking ‘what is DIFFERENT about the trial. What is different about ME, about how I’m communicating to my dog, about how my dog is or isn’t receiving that communication.’ Not rhetorically. Specifically.
Is he looking at you before the release, or past you? Is his weight back, or already forward? Was he like this in the first class of the day, or only after a run went badly? Can you reproduce ANY of it at home, on purpose, by changing one thing?
Learning to observe analytically but without judgment is a skill, to be sure. And it’s more nuanced and a lot less of a quick dopamine hit than buying something, which is probably why it’s the part most of us skip. It’s why its hard to look in the mirror at ourselves sometimes. Sometimes we just don’t want to SEE things. Sometimes we CAN’T see things…yet.
No online course can teach you to read the dog in front of you. My online courses can’t either. What an online course CAN do, and what mine are built to do, is provide you a framework, a jumping off point, and a safe space for you to FAFO with somebody looking over your shoulder (even if it’s from far far away) to help encourage you to inspect the details that AREN’T addressed to everybody but need to be tweaked for your specific dog, in that specific moment, so that you can build a mental database to draw upon when the NEXT unique situation arises.
The whole system lives inside The Agility Challenge. My door is open!