Saturday, February 4, 2012

Scheduling Training

During January, I was feeling overwhelmed with trying to keep up with training and exercising all 3 Flat-Coats and my other work-related tasks outside of my teaching schedule. I kept feeling like I was not giving adequate time to each dog, nor to my office work/administrative tasks that I am responsible for (I remain incredibly grateful for my wonderful office manager, Marcia, who deals with the large majority of the office work and phone calls). I sat down a couple of weeks ago to try to come up with a list of what I wanted to do with each dog each week, such as training and exercise, how many times for each item in a week, and then to spread it out over the week into manageable chunks. The schedule I came up with is this:

Sunday: Train Sonic, Office work
Monday: Exercise Gryff (his circuit strength workout), Train Sonic
Tuesday: Bike dogs, Train Ty
Wednesday: Office work, Train Ty, Train Sonic
Thursday: Bike dogs, Train Sonic, Train Ty
Friday: Exercise Gryff, Office work, Train Sonic
Saturday: Bike dogs, Train Ty

Yeah, I'm tired, too, just looking at it! It has only been in place a couple of weeks, but I think it is helping give me a focus for what I choose to do. If I don't get to something on a given day, I try to make it a priority the next day. I've been biking the dogs by doing laps in my big training building. Gryff has to be on leash because otherwise, he goes in the center and lies down to squeak whatever toy I provide him. I've been letting Sonic join in, but sometimes she's just too wild and has to go in her crate. Little 10 year old Border Terrier Joker just trots along a few feet behind the bike. It isn't something I taught him, but he just does it naturally. Ty dashes about at first, but usually settles into a trot somewhere near me after the initial few minutes. She prefers to have 2 tennis balls at all times. This morning, I felt like I had achieved toy nirvana in that Sonic and Gryff mostly didn't pester each other for the other one's toy. After we finished our 20 minutes this morning, I set up the iPad to capture what it looks like. Slightly atypical, in that Ty was off busy with her tennis balls.



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