Training gone amuck

Last night Phoenix and I went to the park in Conroy to do some obedience training. It’s a tiny little park in a tiny little town but honestly, last night it had more distractions than a barrel full of monkeys. In fact, if we’d stayed much longer, I have complete confidence a barrel full of monkeys would have rolled out of somewhere. It was that kind of night.

One of my goals this summer is to train away from home AT LEAST once a week. I’m trying hard not to count training at SueAnn’s or Kay’s buildings, which we’re at frequently, because Phoenix has spent so much time there, he is virtually bombproof. While it’s great to have a “perfect” workout in a clean, quiet, matted, gated building, that’s just going through the motions and it’s not doing either of us any good.

What the two of us need are brand new training sites. I don’t worry about whether there are distractions there or not. Just being in a new site is enough of a distraction. Phoenix is 2 1/2. He’s got tremendous drive (food and play/prey) and a wonderful work ethic. He loves to train but he needs work on focusing on me and his work when there are other things going on. Last night’s session was an example of “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.”

We were just getting started when a squirrel ran across the grass in front of us and zipped up a tree. Squirrels rank right behind cats on Phoenix’s list of “Animals I Want To Get to Know Better and Must Catch One to Investigate and Possibly Eat.” He had a laser target lock on the tree where the squirrel disappeared. Not only was his brain totally focussed on the squirrel, his body had gone into something resembling full rigor. He was totally rigid from whiskers to tail. I tried tugging him in my direction. It was like tugging a cement statue. The evening’s training agenda I had so carefully crafted that afternoon (okay, it was a slow day at work) flew out the window.

First I had to get him back from Squirrel-vania. He wouldn’t watch me, wouldn’t play with me, wouldn’t do anything but obsess about that d*mn squirrel. I did some head holds, some bouncing and finally got him to tug, gradually playing closer and closer to the squirrel tree. The little varmint had disappeared. If he’d shown his face again, I might have climbed the tree and throttled him myself.

After about 10 minutes of this, Phoenix gave up on his squirrel pursuit and was once again “my” dog. I wiped the sweat off my brow, pulled out his dumbbell and was ready to start some retrieve work when something that sounded like the Hound of the Baskervilles launched from a house across the street. A fat beagle waddled onto the front porch and started baying. How could so much noise come out of such a small dog?

Phoenix was clearly annoyed. His reaction wasn’t so much a distraction issue as it was “Someone needs to go make that dog shut up and I’m volunteering.” While I heartily supported this in theory, it was unacceptable in reality and off we went again with a series of exercises to get his focus off the baying hound and back on me.

More hands-on corrections and more Crazy Dog Lady antics (imagine a middle-aged woman doing fake ballet leaps across the park, waving a fake-fur skunk pelt over her head, being chased by a dog with an insane gleam in his eye; honestly, it’s a wonder I haven’t been arrested) remedied the situation.

By now we’d been training for nearly 20 minutes and hadn’t done one darn thing I’d planned. I abandoned retrieving and decided to focus our remaining time working on drop on recalls.

I set him up in a stay, walked 40 feet away, turned, opened my mouth to start psyching him up and my voice was immediately drowned by the RATTLE-CLACKETY-CLACK of someone driving a lawn mower down the middle of the street. This is Conroy, remember. You could walk from one end of town to the other in two minutes but residents get from Point A to Point B by any means possible, including but not limited to ATVs, tractors, snowmobiles and, apparently, lawnmowers.

It was a question of who was staring harder. Phoenix decided he had never seen a lawnmower before in his life. (Granted, when he sees the mower at our house it is, well, mowing the lawn, not rattling down the street). He was staring at that mower like it was some bizarre mechanical creature in need of pursuit. The guy on the mower was staring at me like he’d never seen a woman with a dog in the park before. (Possibly he’d seen my ballet leaping, skunk-pelt flinging act earlier and was hoping for a repeat performance. Or not.) I was staring at Phoenix, wondering what in the h*ll was going to happen next and if maybe, just maybe, we could possibly string together 5 minutes of productive training before we ran out of daylight.

The mower proved less interesting than the squirrel (still up the tree) or the beagle (still baying on the porch) and we did indeed manage to salvage 10 minutes of uninterrupted training before I called it a night.

In retrospect, it might not have been the training session I had in mind but it certainly gave me multiple chances to work through distractions. I also figure it qualifies as aerobic exercise although darned if I know how I’m going to explain it to my cardiologist.