Laurie's Blogs.

So today (as I write this, Sunday) my hubby and I tried something new.  I was pretty nervous about it.  We had never done this before, and I was most worried that it would go terribly wrong… and the spectators would snicker.

We took my 3 year old Borzoi to a Lure Course practice!  A vet-friend-past-client invited me to the non-sight hound day since she has a Ridgeback that can only run on the non-sight hound days, and I wanted to try it out with someone that could tell me what to do / show me the ropes.  And as a nervous 'Mom', I didn't want all of the 'real' sight hounds to laugh at my girl if she was a big failure.

But she did fairly well for her first time and in hind-sight I was the big failure.  Why?  Well, let me tell you!  Talya wasn't terribly interested in watching the other dogs run… she didn't get excited, she didn't squeak, she pretty much just stood there leaning on various people (as Borzoi's do).  So I was quite surprised when the lure (plastic bag attached to a string) took off, that she actually chased it.  She got a bit hung up at the first corner turn (she wasn't' anticipating the turn, so it was not a graceful turn) and so she stopped and started sniffing until my husband ran down to that end to get her 'started again' and then she finished the race and 'killed' the plastic bag as she's supposed to do.  The second run she completed the whole thing without stopping, and the third run she did a stop and sniff at the first turn again, but I was there to redirect her to 'go get it' and she resumed chasing the bags.

So all in all, I was rather pleased in her debut.  And here's what we did right:

• I brushed her the night before… so she didn't look like some homeless dog, but she was still shedding like crazy!
• We remembered to bring her water.  (We don't do dog sports and never travel very far with our dogs, so believe it or not, we were so pleased with ourselves that we remembered to bring her water.)
• We walked her out after the runs.
• It was a cool day, but when the sun did start to shine, we put her back in the car (which was cooler than being out in the direct sun).
• And we deemed her to be fit enough to endure a short sprint… since she does this already in the fields when we go for walks.

Okay… so not too bad for non-sport dog parents.  HOWEVER, what we didn't do (and what nobody did when I came to think about it) was to warm her up.  And I feel like such a schmuck!  The non-sight hounds (and perhaps the dogs that had done this before) were just nutty about watching the other dogs run; Bouncing, squeaking, making little lunges, essentially warming themselves up.  Talya on the other hand was mostly laying on her blanket between races.  Many of the other dogs were laying beside their owners, in a crate, or in the cars… and they were just taken to the line when it was their turn.  I'm blaming my warm-up 'brain-fart' (I hope that translates for all of the non-English-as-a-first-language readers… substitute 'blunder' for 'brain-fart' if that sentence doesn't make sense) on the fact that we were 'newbies' and that nobody else was warming up… and we were just watching others to know what to do.

But what should we have done?

• Firstly, I know that my girl has hyper-mobile shoulders… so I really should have just checked them first to make sure that they were positioned where they should be and warmed up adequately (a couple of mobilizations might have been useful).
• And I likely should have done a full evaluation on her the night before / week before… but as the saying goes 'the cobblers children have no shoes.'  So I don't look at my dogs as often as I should!
• WARM-UP!!  You saw that coming didn't you?!  Because this was a sprint event, on a not-so-hot-not-so-cold day, a 5 minute warm-up would have been suffice… maybe 10 (I hear that 15 - 20 is appropriate in human athletes).  We should have been walking her around more often throughout the event.  Maybe we should have had her chasing a lure on the end of a rope (some folks has been doing that earlier to get their dogs interested in the lure.)  I could have trotted her back and forth and had her doing small jumps.  Just a few… not wanting to deplete her ATP & glycogen stores… just wanting to get her muscle warmer.

So next time… I will try to be a better sporting-dog owner!  Because I really should know better… and maybe the others will take note, maybe ask me questions, and think about doing the same!

(Check out her run here on YouTube:  http://youtu.be/equmzExFK98 )

Until next time… Cheers!  Laurie