Summer Season Begins

While I try to stay active with my dogs throughout the year, summer is really the time of a million activities. If we aren't dock diving or lure coursing or playing flyball, we are at the park walking, playing fetch, or swimming at the river.

On Saturday, we had to choose between lure coursing or dock diving. Lure coursing was closer and cheaper, so it won. A number of my flyball friends came down to practice as well, which was fun. I like my lure coursing friends, of course, but I love seeing people get their dogs involved in something new, and I like visiting with my flyball people outside of flyball.

One of my friends was even awesome enough to release my dogs for me, so I could stand off to the side and get some pictures of them.

Digging in right after being released, trying to get up to speed

This particular practice we use a reversing lure. The dog runs straight out away from the handler, then the lure reverses and they run straight back to the handler again.

In full flight headed away after the lure

My little cannonball of muscle

This method makes it easy to catch the dogs at the end of their run. Reversing the lure also helps correct dogs who "cheat" by running far off to the side of the lure or who anticipate and cut corners. The lure gets reversed as soon as the dog veers away from it, drawing them back and forcing them to run more honestly.

On her way back, head a bit farther up as the lure slows down at the end

Bounding to the stationary lure at the end of the course

Caught the bunny.

At our practices, each dog gets to run twice, with a nice long break in between to cool off between runs. Using the reversing lure makes the practices run really quickly as well, since there is no need to spend time resetting the lure by hand like we have to when using a drag lure.

Pallo's most graceful coursing shot. He isn't super graceful when running, but is very powerful and absurdly fast for his short little legs.

The first run with each of my dogs, I released them myself, then crouched down to get some photos of them heading away and heading back to me. That's how I got the photo from yesterday's BW Sunday post of Pallo in full flight headed away from me. 

Here is the headed away shot in color

This gives you a good idea of what the practice is like. First the dog heads straight out after the lure. Then the lure reverses at the far end of the field, and then the dog chases it back to the starting point again.

But he returned with the same enthusiasm he left with

Koira is fast enough that I wasn't able to get crouched down and focused fast enough to get a good picture of her heading away from me, but I did get a couple of her coming back. I like the straight on lure coursing photos, but not as much as the side views.

Koira headed straight back to me as well

Has anyone else been ramping up their summer activities? Do you keep having to choose what kind of awesome adventure will come each day?