I love Silvia Trkman. She is my dog training super hero. I wish I could require every single one of my agility students to get her DVD Ready-Steady-Go. It’s the best agility foundation video I’ve ever seen, and it has pretty much nothing to do with agility. It’s about running around in the forest and playing with your dog.
You can buy a DVD, or you can download it all the way from Slovenia. I could listen to her talk forever. She also teaches online classes in running dogwalks and cool tricks, but I think the Ready-Steady-Go DVD kind of sums up all of agility and dog training for me.
You have to connect some of the dots yourself. You should definitely like playing with your dogs. You probably should know some of the basics about shaping behaviors and teaching tricks, although I think you could learn a lot of them just by watching her train her dogs in the videos. She has lots of free information about training on her website, too. Most everything I learned about training a running dogwalk I figured out from stuff Silvia already figured out. Bonus beautiful mountains of Corsica footage. You can just sit there and watch it and pretend you’re Silvia out there running around in the mountains if you’re totally lazy and never even train your dogs.
Or you’ll be inspired to get up off your ass and go out there and run around with your own dogs.
December is a good month to work on stuff. I’m going to work on channeling Silvia Trkman every time I go out with my dogs. Maybe you’ll want to, too.
Buy a copy of Ready-Steady-Go on her website lolabuland.com or put it on your Santa list. I think you’re gonna like it.
Silvia came here a couple of years ago and I found her to be like a breath of fresh Corsican mountain air. One of the things she said I think about constantly(and force my students to chant, mantra-like) is: "The joy is in the running." I think I may put that on my Christmas cards this year…
Just got my copy and plan to spend quality time this weekend watching it and running around with my dogs. Unfortunately the running will be done mostly in a friends enormous backyard (I have a yard like yours) or on the baseball fields at the park at 7 am when the po po is sleeping in their squad car. I bet it's a lot better in the mountains or on the beach.
I am really glad for my forests and beaches I have here, we are very, very lucky. Silvia's mountains are this whole other thing, unbelievable.
Yep, the joy is in the running. We only had 10 minutes to run around one of our usual fields tonight in horrible wind and almost dark, but it sure is a good way to end the day. We sure do like fast running together!
yep, i already put that dvd on my xmas list for santa… somehow its just all turned into agility things on that list now… BUT i wanted to say – you guys look like total twins in that picture