The Game... its every were.

Or so says the title of one of my student essays I'm grading today (yes... that title is written verbatim). LOL.

Anyways... it's come to my attention that my last post was a bit of a downer. I didn't start out writing it with that spirit in mind, but it kind of ended up like that. You know how it goes. Yes, my self esteem has taken a huge hit from my experiences in grad school, but you may have guessed that my self esteem wasn't that good to begin with :). So, I apologize if that last post made y'all uncomfortable or made it seem like I don't appreciate what grad school has given me.

While, yes, it has shown me a lot of things about myself that are negative, it has also shown me that I am, in fact, capable of a lot of things that I would have never guessed. Like being able to stand up in front of an entire class of students and teach them how to write and think critically. And actually notice a positive difference in their work between the beginning of the semester and the end. That is an achievement I never thought I'd be able to pull off, and I'm proud of that.

Trying to think more positively about grad school (and watching WTT videos) got me thinking, well, about agility. Surprise! haha. Both school and agility have taught me that it's okay to feel like you've failed--as long as you can move on from that failure and use the information to approach similar situations differently in the future. That's a lot more productive than a bunch of self-absorbed whining.

This morning I read this post by one of my favorite agility handlers, Daisy Peel. Daisy, for those of you who don't follow agility, just made the US Agility World team for the second time with her amazing dog, Solar. Because she and I train with similar handling styles (Linda Mecklenburg/Awesome Paws) I watch her videos often to study how she runs her dogs. In this blog post, she talks about making the world team and the amount of physical and mental effort it took to get there. Reading this post made me think about how much I need to step up my game.

I haven't been trialing very long (we've done four trials so far), so I haven't put much thought into my mental and physical game, other than just surface/survival-type stuff. For example, I know that I need to stretch my hamstrings before running, stretch Cedar's back and hindquarters out, and make her look at me before taking her leash off at the start line. But really, I haven't gone much further than that. Now that we're out of Novice, I really need to step up my game :)...because once we get more reliable with weaves, I think we'll sail through Open and right into Excellent. I care enough about my dog, myself, and doing well in this sport to put the time into making sure Cedar and I are as prepped and ready as possible.

Starting with my mental game. I really need to put more thought in how I approach walking the course and prepping myself and my dog for a run. Now that I have a little bit of time to think about this kind of stuff (and read for fun--yay!), I am going to take another look at the Don Blazer book (if you haven't read it and you compete with animals, you should. It's about horses, but the lessons apply to dogs quite well). I also ordered the book Daisy Peel talks about in her post, With Winning In Mind. I'm hoping that that book will teach me even more about developing my mental game. I think that if I can get a handle on that, I will be a better handler and more in tune with my dog... which is what really matters, right? Learning to manage my nerves better will only be beneficial to Cedar and I in the long run.

The other part of the equation is my physical game. I am not in as good of shape as I would like... and would like to change that. I do a pretty good job of keeping up with Cedar on the course, but I feel that I could do even better... and would like to have more stamina on trial days. By the end of the day, I'm just so TIRED, emotionally and physically, that I know something needs to change. I'm having fun, of course, but it would be awesome to have more energy.

So, I'm going to use my love of agility to help motivate me to get my mind and body in better shape. I move to Washington in just a few weeks, and am hoping that this change in my normal "patterns" will shake things up enough for me to get a good start on changing some of the unhealthy patterns I've developed in grad school.

Hope you all have a wonderful day! Stay tuned for a new post tomorrow about Moss and what he's been up to lately :)