More adventures in the Conroy Park

The best thing about being home on the weekend is having time to pack up jumps and ring gates and go somewhere for a a training session that isn’t rushed by the need to do some domestic crap, teach a class, etc. It seems like all too often, my training is done in a hurry on weeknights: a quick 10 minutes here, another stolen 5 minutes there, working fronts and finishes while waiting my turn at agility class, doing stays around the house (put the baby dog between the OTCh. dogs and hope he absorbs something), trying to get a fast session done before the class I teach on Thursdays, you know, that sort of thing.

Admitedly, that’s better than not training at all and in all honestly, training that way makes me focus on the job at hand because there isn’t time for screwing around. I can get a lot done in a short amount of time and for the most part, it works.

But ahhhh . . . the pleasure of driving to a park and knowing if I want to train for 20 minutes or an hour, it’s totally up to me and my dog.

So Phoenix and I took off for the Conroy Park Saturday morning. We got there at 7:15 a.m. What’s this? There are people here! In my park! Nobody in Conroy gets up that early!

Come to find out, the park was a staging area for the Conroy Fun Day 5K. Which, by the way, might have been the world’s smallest 5K. Not that I’m an expert or anything but I think there were more people working the registration table and acting as race officials than there were runners.

I set up my jumps and stuff at the far end of the park and we had a great training session. It wasn’t “great” in terms of Phoenix doing everything perfectly because he was certainly distracted by the race preparation and made all sorts of errors. But it was excellent in terms of having time to slow down and work through those distractions and show him A) he COULD ignore them and B) he WOULD be well paid for continuing to ignore them.

Remember what I said about the Conroy Park in an earlier post this month? Now I have another form of transportation to add to the lawnmowers, ATVs, golf carts and tractors people use to get around town. A skid-loader! Yep, a fellow drove up on his skid-loader, parked it and went on his merry way. I think (hope) he was going to move equipment with it later but didn’t stick around to watch.

We finished our session by doing a sit/stay while the race started and people ran, jogged, walked and stumbled down the street past us. I’m sure Phoenix thought this was one of the most bizarre behaviors he’s ever seen: humans running in a pack but no prey in sight.

Just as I was putting my stuff away, a gal came over and wanted to pet my dog. Of course, he was happy to oblige. (Please, rub some MORE loose hair out of my dog. Wait, here's a brush, knock yourself out!) Her bro-in-law is a K9 officer in Muscatine and has a malinois drug dog so she actually recognized what breed ‘Nix was. That doesn’t happen every day, especially in Conroy!