You know the drive home? The one where you go back over how the weekend went the whole way home and try to decide what it all meant?
He broke the startline. The contact wasn’t there. You got the wrong lead out of the tunnel and the rest of the run was a scramble. And by the time you hit the interstate you’ve decided that something has gone backwards, or that you’ve wasted six months, or that this dog just can’t do it.
I want to offer you a different way to think about this, and I think it’s the more accurate one.
Nothing new broke this weekend.
Think about what your training sessions at home actually look like.
Same space. Same footing. The same jumps your dog has seen five hundred times. You’re relaxed, because there’s no run order and nothing is riding on it. You’ve got food and/or toys on you. If something goes sideways you can reset and do it again, and help a little the second time. Nobody is watching. And your dog is fresh, not four hours into a day in a crate.
When you walk into a trial, all of them come out at once. And whatever was being held up by the environment rather than by the training comes down.
It didn’t break at the trial. It was already loose. The trial is just the first place you could SEE it.
The ring doesn’t just test your dog. It tests what you brought with you.
So, here’s what I’d do with that drive home.
Before you decide what the weekend MEANT, write down what was actually different. And be specific, because specific is the whole trick.
Not “he broke his startline.”
Try: “he broke his startline in the first class of the day, after two hours in the crate, in a building with a loud fan, and I was rushing because I thought I was going to miss my run.”
The first version is a verdict, and there’s nothing you can do with a verdict. The second one is a list, and every single thing on the list is something you can go train on a Tuesday.
Noise. Fatigue. Being hurried. A building he’s never been in. You can reproduce every one of those on purpose, at home, one at a time.
A clean weekend tells you almost nothing, although it FEELS amazing, and let’s be honest, it’s what keeps us coming back for more. Everything held, and you have no idea which parts were load-bearing and which parts were being carried by the building.
Anything less than that perfect weekend hands you a list. It may feel like a consolation prize, but it’s genuinely more useful than a perfect weekend (although your ego may not agree!). You may not have come home with a ribbon for your efforts, BUT, you arguably came home with something even better when it comes to your overall journey of self-improvement through dog training and dog sport!
Reading a weekend this way is most of what we do together. The whole system lives inside The Agility Challenge. Door is here.