Weekend all busy

What a weekend.

Friday came and went, mostly on preparations for the Saturday. Spent majority of the day on a training course for boy/girlscout leaders about plays and games for the kids. During the training I was -in the games, of course- the following:

- a Princess
- a Monster
- a Stone
- a Bat
- a Snake
- a Pirate (HARRR!)

and I was forced to do the following

- hide
- seek
- slide on the floor
- run
- jump
- draw
- sing

and all that in 5 hours including lunch! Honestly speaking, I was finished when I got back home.

On Sunday our dogs had a Lure Coursing competition. Considering the fact that we have been neglecting the long walks in the woods for some time now, the competition went quite well. Our male was third. The points of the finalists were quite high, so I'm very pleased on his performance. I have to write about LC more sometime, as there are some real peculiarities in there. Well, as far as I have heard, the whole dog-kennel-scene is filled with peculiar aspects of human behaviour...

What is really peculiar about the typical lure-coursing competition is in fact the way people handle their dogs. Considering that the dogs run twice a zig-zagging track about 600-1000 m long, they are generally not prepared for the activity. If you think of a human athlete preparing for 800m track, he will be warming up, stretching and concentrating. The dog athletes are generally taken to the track and let loose.

After a race, a human athlete will cool himself down, use some recovery drinks and foods and stretch and relax. Dog athletes, on the other hand, are walked to the car and stuffed in to wait for the next lap.

For us it's somewhat different. Our main concern is that the dogs are fit, well and willing to compete in full in the next competition, too. This means that in competitions we treat them as top athletes: we do a long walk with increasing intensitiy before the lap, and we cool them down with similar walk -decreasing intensity, naturally- after the lap.

This is repeated for the second lap, the finals.

All in all, the day is all walking and jogging with the dogs. We have once had a pedometer with us and it showed after a competition day that we had walked wbout 9.5 km during the day. No wonder we're as finished as the dogs as we return home!

I've seen during this competition season a few dogs lose their interest in the competing. They have been the dogs who have been taken to the track without proper warming up and have been put into the car after the race, without cooling them down. In the next lap they have been stiff, sore and most probably also in some muscle pain from the earlier strain. The most peculiar thing is the fact that the owners of the dog blame the dog for the poor performance, instead of taking the time to evaluate the situation and checking what was done (and what could be done otherwise).

What does this have to do with MMO's? Not much, except that if there is a wipe, it's not necessarily the healer's or the tank's fault. It's always good to start from yourself and change the way you work before launching on others.

Point taken.