We had a great opportunity to have a young energetic agility enthusiast to visit OneMind Dogs as his practical training period from school. In this blog Kim will tell us more about his week in Turku, Finland.
I’m Kim Berglund, a 16 year old student and I’ve been training agility for nearly 4 years now. I was born in the middle of the agility world as my mother and father both do agility and currently we have five dogs at home. My mother is also an agility judge and she travels actively around Finland judging.
Spike is my first agility dog and we compete in the highest class with him. Our best achievements so far are, first place in the medium dogs at the Finnish Agility Junior Handler Championship in 2012 and the third place in 2013. Last year I got a chance to also compete in the large dogs class with Jenni Leino’s Border Collie Loox - and we won first place! I also recently participated with Spike in the 2013 Junior European Open in Switzerland.
Here you can find some videos:
An interview at the Finnish WC Qualifications in 2013 (in Finnish)
Me & Spike competing in Lapua, Finland in 2012
Spike became a Finnish Agility Champion
The winning course with Border Collie Loox at the Finnish Junior Handler Championship
One successfull day & double clean run
For more videos, check out my personal YouTube Channel
One Step Closer to My Dream...
Last autumn we had a practical training section at school and I wanted to travel to Turku to learn more about dog training. Luckily I had an opportunity to actually complete the practical training section at OneMind Dogs! I was able to follow their training in practise, learn more about the office work and the video editing process. The goal for this practise is to offer an opportunity to students to follow and explore and familiarise themselves with a world and field they are interested in. This week totally confirmed my ideas that this is what I want to do in the future! I even founded my own company last year and started to actually make my dream to come true.
Monday
The week started together with Noora at the office in Logomo. During the day I wrote some blog posts, for example about the view of a young agility enthusiast and about my dream of becoming a dog trainer, of which you can read more about later. I also introduced myself more thoroughly with the OneMind Dogs Method. This day was a really good start for the week and the practical training. I learned a lot and got the chance to analyse my thoughts too.
Tuesday
Today I was following the training at the Purina Center. Elina Jänesniemi had puppy classes and I learned a lot of new things and understood new aspects about training with young dogs. We did some basic handling exercises and also got a chance to practise being an instructor for the last group of the evening. That was a bit exciting indeed :)
Wednesday
Originally we were supposed to do some video editing today but since it was moved to another day, I practically had a day off. However, I was really lucky to get a private agility class with Elina Jänesniemi. That was an awesome opportunity for me to try some of the handling techniques myself with Spike. I learned more about what works best for me and Spike. I stayed the evening also at the training hall and was auditing and helping a bit in Janita’s training classes.
Thursday
Thursday was filled with excitement! I got an opportunity to instruct training classes together with Tuulia’s husband Timo Liuhto. Earlier I had planned the training myself and then we built the exercise course together with Janita and Jaakko.
During the classes we had the training at the same time with Timo, only a fence between our groups. They actually put me in a real test! But I survived, it was really inspiring!
Friday
In my opinion this day was excellent ending for the week. I was attending the editing process at the studio together with Tuulia! We were working with one handling technique video and did some changes and improvements to it. It was an excellent way to study and understand more about how your position and body actually effects on the dog.
It was an amazing week! Thank you so much the entire OneMind Dogs team for this opportunity. I learned a lot and what’s best - I got hooked in this and I will definitely continue on this road in the future! There are not enough words to thank you. It was truly remarkable experience for me.
Thank you!
Written by Kim Berglund
