U-TURNS, Wednesday Morning Field Practice

Updated 4/1/12 (April Fool's Day)  I Googled "dog agility flip" and was disappointed that this blog post from last August was the first entry and there wasn't much else out there. It is a confusing read. I had not remembered writing about it. I didn't know much about it when I wrote it.  I feel like a fool.  I'm leaving the post up due to it's high Google placement, and the course sequence is well worth setting up and trying, but the subject is much better covered in The 180 Flip which I posted today (no fooling).
Sheryl, bless her, and I met at the field again today, 8:30 a.m.  We feel rushed to practice eanother lawn mowing, and there will be nothing set up again until Saturday night, so we stayed there for 2.5 hours.

On this chart, we ran into a particularly difficult sequence we never could figure out how to do smoothly and predictably.  It was too easy to get stuck behind the dummy (turquoise) jumps. 

As illustrated, green H can handle 1 (see-saw), from the right side and be in a good position to direct D into the tunnel past 4, then U-turn back and over 4 with a right/left arm change, but on the red path after the FC before 4, the rest of path is the same (orange path and H).  I moved the upper turquoise jump to the right to make room for my orange H's, but in reality it is right in the H1 space so there isn't as much room at H1 to maneuver as shown.  It becomes imperative to block that jump with your body.

At H2, it's very hard to run fast enough to get a FC in -- you almost have to flip D to 6.  But flips are frowned upon in some schools, and it makes you feel like a darn airplane there are so many arm changes in this sequence!  I don't know what else to do?  I may reach out and ask our local experts.

Addendum: I did reach out, and Georgie came back with the FC solution.  I tried it several times but there isn't really enough time at H2.  So I resorted to the flip.  It worked for Maxie about half the time.  Lucky went HUH!  I can see that teaching the flip is important after all.  Sometimes you might need that flip.  Okay, so next I'll blog about The Flip.