Measuring and goal setting

We had an interesting weekend of measuring.

In goal setting measuring is sometimes the hardest thing to do. Without a starting measure or idea of what you want the finishing measure to be then it is hard to know if you have reached your target.

I had some ideas of the times of the top dogs on contacts etc which I used last year to time Rhyme in order to see if we would be competitive in the Championship classes. Last weekend I a real chance to see how we 'measured up" in his first Championship class.

We achieved one of my main goals for this year already by getting a clear in the jumping round. This then helped me set my next goal and gave me a figure of 2 seconds to work on over the course as a whole as we were 2 seconds off the top dogs.

I am greatly encouraged by that as 2 seconds is not really a lot and can be broken down into manageable pieces.

For me one of the reasons I am off the pace is that my fitness can be improved. Before Christmas myself and my neighbour got together to help each other lose weight. We meet once a week for a weigh in and to exercise. We are making good progress. I am confident that this will help with my agility times and watching my weight can be easily measured.

Mark and I will be looking at some of the other tests available to check and the assess  any improvements to our fitness once we get another spare weekend. I will report back on that.

Meanwhile something else we looked at was measuring our dogs height. This weekend we are both doing the judges practical. I am also doing the new rules and regs exam on Saturday. Mark is looking to be a Champ judge once he's jumped through the hoops and I'm just wanting to add judging to my agility experiences. I have 3 appointments booked for this year (provided I pass of course). We also thought that it may be good to become measurers.

Having a relatively quiet day lined up we decided to practice measuring our own dogs. We measured first thing before breakfast, midday and after they had been fed in the afternoon.

Pickachu - 320, 328, 320

Moog - 545, 560, 551

Rhyme - 528, 540,550

Devo - 523, 533, 515

Torro - 545,552, 551

Kodi - 491, 491, 496

Quite surprising results including that some were smaller straight after their food. The main thing to us that it is not an exact science.

Being able to stand to be measured is quite important especially the smaller wiggly ones like Pikachu. we do not want her to be stressed about agility and so I spent some time teaching her that the measure was a fun place to be. 

Also I think we may stick to running our own dogs, judging, training and our other commitments for now and maybe come back to measuring next year :)