For more on running contacts, it's best to join running contacts class or get a Running Contacts DVD. This page is meant for those who just have a quick question or want to show their finished product - you are very welcome to do so, it still brings a smile to my face when I see a beautiful running contact, it's something addictive about it. It is on times frustrating as well... - but it all makes the end result even sweeter. So... Happy training, everybody!
 Silvia Trkman is known for bringing every dog, from her first dog on, to the very top of the sport. Her dogs are known for great speed, tight turns, running contacts and long and injury-free careers. Silvia is in agility since 1992 and is– 3x World Champion (with two different dogs)
– 5x European Open winner, with 4 different dogs (Lo, La, Bu, Le)!!!
– National Championships podium and World Team member with every dog she’s ever had – National Champion for 22-times (with 5 different dogs of 3 different breeds) – World Team member for 19-times (mostly with at least two dogs at the time – sometimes four 🙂 ) |
Hallo!
My name is Laura and I retrained my Sheltie Charlie from 2on/2off, they were getting really terrible you can see is here:
so we started to train running contacts, i think it was a really long way, but he´s getting the idea now, i think 😀
so this weekend we´ll have our world championship qualifications, let´s see what happens 🙂
We are going to try and get our world championship qualifications on these runs. I’ll share next week with the results. Canon is doing nicely, although we are not totally finished developing our running. As I tried to enforce the feet in the contact, she slowed down to be careful to get it. now we are working on the running full speed, accelerating over the dw. i have found that when we work going to another obstacle after the DW she is getting her feet where they belong and not jumping off and accelerating nicely. We’ll see! Have fun!
Nice to hear from some re-trains too! What was the hardest step for Charlie: starting to really run on a plank, transferring the behavior from a plank to a dog-walk (as he already knew it before) or getting the same performance in competition?
Good luck in Schwanenstadt!!!
Hi there. My BC Solar was trained using Silvia’s contact method, and has a running dogwalk and aframe. He is not yet three and has won already two National Championships!
Here are some of our early videos:
httpv://www.youtube.com/user/cflyrun#grid/user/CDE12AA9D97C2F11
And here is our winning AKC Nationals win from just a couple weeks ago:
And our winning USDAA Nationals win from November 2009:
This was Solar’s first time at both USDAA and AKC Nationals 🙂
Very impressive, both Daisy and Solar! I love his jumping style! But what was that at the end of Grand Prix, a blind cross?!? I thought those are strictly forbidden in US!:)
Didn’t you start to retrain Jester to running contacts too? How did that project end? Did it work?
I did toy with retraining Jester to a running contact, but alas, I did too good a job teaching him 2o/2o! As soon as he got a little tired mentally or physically he would STOP, and NOTHING would get him off except “OK”, which of course is a reward/validation of the behavior I didn’t want him to do in the first place. So, I tabled the project 🙂 I keep thinking maybe when I have more time…but that never seems to happen.
I’m looking forward to teaching Juno, Solar’s little sister, who is just 14 weeks old right now, running contacts in the future!
Yes, it’s very tricky with dogs that were trained 2on2off too well!:)
Wow, new puppy! Can’t wait to see some videos of her!!!
Ha ha, you know, I got a lot of comments doing that silly blind cross at the end of the run, and people wanted to know how I trained it. But the truth is that I tried it at the practice jump and it worked, so why not 🙂 But the practice jump was the first time Solar had ever seen it for sure, maybe the 2nd time Jester had. No need to practice!
It’s true, dogs just understand it. And it’s sometimes very nice that you don’t need to turn your feet around and can just RUN!
mh i think the hardest step for charlie was transferring the behavior from the plank to dog-walk, i tried to make the plank of the dogwalk look like our one. so I put a little bit of the carpet we had on ours onto the dogwalk. i think that helped him a lot. And of course he has not forgotten the 2on/2off, we still use it on the see-saw 🙂
Our current problem is, we have a very small indoor agility hall for training in winter, i think charlie is not very comfortable on the dog walk there because there is not much space after the dogwalk to run. He likes it most, when i´m a little bit away and do not disturb him. I hope he gets used to less space 🙂
Thank you! Fortunately the hall in Schwanenstadt is very big, so lots of space for big Charlie 🙂
Hello!
I have a 15month old PRT named Pepper. It took us qiute a long time to get to full hight with the RC, mainly because I had/have trouble with recognizeing jumps. When we tried the DW for the first time his jumping % got really high. It looks like he needs to get used to the distance, because if I put him on the top of the down plank he doesn’t jump, when I put him further back he starts jumping. So we’ll take it slow and go back a few cm each session. And I leave the clicking to the profesionals (my instructor), to prevent myself from clicking the mistakes. 🙂
Hm, have to look at that tomorrow, I guess I see you at the club. The most common two reasons for this kind of a problem are: 1. The dog is afraid of a dog-walk, runs slower as on a plank, striding is off, so he misses a contact. Or 2. The dog didn’t run full speed on a plank and now that he does (as there is more room), he doesn’t know how to do the contact at full speed. The solution for the first problem is to keep running the dog-walk and ignore jumping and the solution for second problem would be going back to the plank and getting more speed there (maybe by throwing a toy in advance?). But yes, it’s sure harder to see what those little legs are doing with small dogs as it is with BCs!
By the way: Pepper is that cute PRT starring in
Puppy class -- Mala sola
Tricks Class
rel=”nofollow”>Puppy Class
andrel=”nofollow”>Tricks Class
Video. Cute, huh?:)I have 16 months old dog BE. I train RC with her (I’ll add a video soon ;)) And I have a question about competition. When she jump the contact at a competition, should I take her back and to correct it or should I just keep going?
I have only a few opportunities to train RC on real DW so I think it could be a problem but I’m trying my best to give her good understanding of RC and just hope it will be OK 🙂
The answer again depends on the reason why she jumped… If it’s because she is not yet comfortable on new equipment/environment, then you should just ignore it and it will get better with experience. This was Bu’s case -- contacts just got better&better with more experience. La on the other hand was sometimes missing out of excitement of a competition (not very common in dogs trained with that method, but as she was the first one ever trained that way, I was still learning from my mistakes with her) and I tried to redo it. She was always perfect on a second try, but again missed it next time, so I stopped doing it and instead addressed a problem in training, adding more excitement into the picture (throwing a toy in advance, preparing her dinner before dog-walk session etc.) -- that solved the problem.
The good thing about RC is that it’s so easy to maintain them that even people like me who don’t know the word discipline and consistency very well:) can maintain them just fine.
Looking forward to see another Malinois in action!
Hi!
My BC and sheltie was trained using Silvia’s contact method, and has a running dogwalk and aframe. It’s so fun and easy when the dog does it quickly, Thanks!
I have a question. My good friend has a sheltie that I help teach running contacts. There was a problem. The dog suddenly began to jump contact. This came after the snow disappeared. In the winter we have had training in the snow and everything was fine, the snow was gone and it was a lot of bad contacts.
No idea how the absence of snow could affect his contacts… Did his speed change in any way?
In general, the best thing to do when things go bad is to go some steps back to help a dog succeed again. Maybe go back to stationary toy after the dog-walk? Or doing just the down-ramp? Please report if it helps!
Your dogs look great!
Thank you, I told a friend, back up a step.
Yesterday was the competition, 1 time no contact, the second time the perfect running contact! We’ll work!
I got a new toy a couple weeks ago and only now have had time to publish the video I’ve gotten with it. It’s a Sanyo Xacti and in addition to shooting in HD, it also shoots short bursts of 240fps and 600fps. Here is a short clip showing two different DW styles, both acceptable to me, shot at 240fps. The great thing about this is that I can review in slow motion right from the camera, no need to wait till I can get to a computer. These videos weren’t edited or anything -- the camcorder took them at a high speed so when played back, they’re in slow motion 🙂
Daisy
Ha-ha, just ordered one of those! I see that was a good buy:). I used to tape it with a camera, but now that Bi has 3-strides, under 1.2s dog-walks, I thought I should get something better afterall:). Will post my videos too once it arrives.
Contacts look great too:). I wouldn’t really call that a different style, he just starts his last stride lower the second time and therefore lands so much lower that front feet get into a contact and rear are on the floor already. Did you notice any change of how often he does it one way or the other? Bi was originally doing them as in the second video, but then switched more and more to rear feet. I don’t know if it’s only because she mostly does 3-stride dog-walks now or because she somehow finds it more comfortable?
Hi there! I have a medium BC, Smitten that has been trained with Silvia’s methods. It seems we always have more work to do, but I’m very happy with the results.
Here is a video of the dogwalk in our backyard:
And here is one of her runs at AKC Nationals (darn that 1st bar!):