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Slow Motion - Find Out What Really Happened

When things happen at a very quick pace and you put your heart and mind to your performance, you won't notice all the things that are not relevant during your run. Videotaping your competition courses and training sessions can be a great source of information afterwards.


Sometimes the reason for a knocked bar can surprise you. See a video of the performance of leading OneMind Dogs Coach Janita Leinonen and her Border Collie Fu in the finals of European Open 2015. Janita says:

"Fu drops bars very rarely. Sometimes we can compete in 30 competitions in a row, do some training in between them, and Fu doesn't drop a single bar. This summer, though, a knocked bar ended two of our major events: Finnish Team Tryouts and the European Open finals.

When my dog drops a bar, I always worry: there is a reason for every knocked bar, and neither one of my latest competition dogs (Hitti & Fu) have dropped bars without a good reason. If my dogs knock bars, I always take them to a check up at an osteopath to make sure that there are no misalignments of vertebrae, or stiffness in their body. This is why I stopped our performance in the European Open finals: I don't want to ask my dog to jump any extra jumps if she is not ok.

After the competition Jaakko said that the bar came down very late. He suspected that Fu hit the wing, and not the bar. At home we watched the video in slow motion to find out what happened: did Fu slip, did she misjudge the jump, did I cue the turn too late or was is just a statistical error? On the video we saw that Fu uses her tail in the turn, and the tail gets wrapped around the metal wing. The bar is still up when Fu lands, so Jaakko was right. It was amazing he was able to notice what happened, watching the finals from 50 meters' distance.

This was the second time during the summer when a bar came down after Fu's tail hits a wing. Next I will try to create a similar situation in training to test whether it is possible for me to do something to affect Fu's jumping style in this type of situation.

I really recommend videotaping training sessions and competition runs. It is easier to start solving problems when you know the reason, not just the consequence."

Janita

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