Today Lightning turned 7mo. For our training, I took him and Laddie to our closest training property, about a three hour round trip. I had hoped to train with some others, but we ended up working alone.

As I’ve described in previous posts, Lightning is now in PRT Stage 2, corresponding to Mike Lardy’s TRT Basics, which means we’re working on yard work and field work in parallel. At the training property, he and I did some of both.

We began with some location-proofing for the Fetch Game that Lightning has been learning in yard work the last couple of days. We had trained it indoors and had also practiced it in our yard, and now we were able to practice it in a field training location with the associated environmental distractions, but at this stage without the distractions of a training group nearby. Lightning has developed a reflexive, instant, lunging response to the Fetch cue, picking a bumper up off the ground and delivering it to me. He showed it in today’s training at the new location when he was right in front of me as well as when he was some distance away. 

After the yard work, we drove around and settled on two locations for field work. At each location, I ran Laddie on some blinds with diversions and keyholes, and then created a setup suitable for Lightning’s current field work objectives for the circumstance where we’re training alone. It’s been too cold lately for swimming, so we were only able to work on land.

My two field setups for Lightning were mirror images of one another. In each case I set up two stickmen, one at around 20y, the other at around 35y. I used a mat for our start line. I would have liked to use a holding blind behind the mat, but the combination of a stiff wind and rock-hard ground made that impractical.

At both locations, I ran Lightning on an angle away from the wind. Judges don’t usually set up marks for the dog to run into the wind because they’d be able to follow the scent to the bird.

I used 3″ white bumpers with streamers, and pistol shots, for all marks. These were poorman marks. For the single marks, I left Lightning in a sit at the start line, walked out, fired the pistol, walked back to him, and sent him on his name. For the doubles, I left him at the start line, walked to the first station, threw the first mark, walked to the second station, threw the second mark, walked back, sent him to the go-bird (the second mark I’d thrown), and when he delivered that, sent him to the memory bird (the first mark I’d thrown).

For the first setup, I ran Lightning on four poorman singles and one poorman double, as follows:

1. Single to short station, thrown outside the angle made by the two stickmen.
2. Single to long station, thrown in the opposite direction, so again outside the angle.
3. Repeat of #1.
4. Repeat of #2.
5. Double made up of the same two marks, the long one thrown first and retrieved last.

For the second setup, I ran Lightning on two singles, a double, and a final single, again all poorman marks, as follows:

1. Single to short station, thrown outside the angle made by the two stickmen.
2. Single to long station, thrown in the same direction, so this time inside the angle. 
3. Double made up of the same two marks, the long one thrown first and retrieved last.
4. 60y single, the only mark of the day not thrown from a stickman but instead thrown from a position in the angle between them, and on an angle back to a fall also in that angle. The bumper was visible in flight but past the crest of a rolling hill on the ground, so Lightning couldn’t see it till he was close to it.

Lightning ran straight to every mark, including the memory birds for the doubles. Not all of his returns were great, but they got increasingly better. For both marks of the last double and for the long final single, he picked up the bumper, came straight back to me, and held the bumper till I took it. I’m not ready to require delivery to hand yet, much less bringing him to heel to deliver, but he even did that for delivering the first mark of the double, positioning himself facing the field and ready to launch toward the memory bird when sent.

Though I didn’t have an assistant to act as gunner today, I felt Lightning was nonetheless making progress on our two current field work objectives with today’s session: running singles with multiple guns out, and lead steadiness. He was dealing with stickmen rather than human gunners, but hopefully it was similar. And he wasn’t practicing lead steadiness because he had to be steady while sitting by himself at the start line, but hopefully his steadiness training was still benefiting.

So that’s where Lightning is at this stage in his training.