Zoning Out

Viva and I have been fortunate to have a number of "zone" runs over the course of our agility lives together. For the most part, I remember lots of them in 2006. There hasn't been a true zone run for awhile, and I've been pondering this. It's not that we've stagnated or gotten worse as a team. It's not that we haven't had our share of great runs, even. Our non-zone runs these days are much, much faster than our zone runs were back in 2006. Still, I crave that feeling of running with Viva in such a way that time stops and we are purely focused in the moment together. Nothing interrupts this: no thoughts, no barking, no abrupt changes of direction or pace. It's as strong a feeling of connection as I've ever experienced.

So why haven't we been back in the zone lately? Going back through my notes, I realized that 2006, the year of the zone run, was the year that I put things together for the first time as a handler. I had been steadily improving since working with Annelise Allan and Stacy Peardot-Goudy at the Agile Canines Agility Camp in the summer of 2005. My timing was better, my dog was barking less (Friends, family, and Icelandic Sheepdog aficionados, please note: I did not write "not barking"), and it seemed as though we were getting closer and closer to being in sync. Then we had it. The first zone run.

The zone run in agility is pretty much the same as the zone performance in chamber music (though, even if you run with an Icelandic Sheepdog, the zone run in agility is quieter). When you're in the zone during a chamber music performance, all of the decisions that the ensemble has to make during rehearsals fall away. No one has to wait for anyone else in order to play precisely together. The artistic intentions are collective, crystal clear, and beautifully executed at all times. Focus is intense, iron-clad, and yet feels effortless. If you possess an external observer, mentally speaking, he or she vanishes. During my best performances, I have no idea how I sound, because I am simply too focused on the artistic choice of the moment to pay that kind of objective (or, far worse, subjective) attention to the sound resulting from that choice. I am on to the next choice. The same holds true for the zone runs I have had with Viva. I think I share this with other handlers: we know, jogging away from the finish line to reward our teammate for a job well done, that we have had a zone run, but most of the individual moments in it are subsumed into the whole.

Once we experience the zone run, then, why don't we have zone runs all the time? Specifically, why haven't I had a zone run with Viva for a while? The common element of the 2006 zone runs was distance. My distance from Viva was a constant: we were working novice and open courses in which I found myself handling a few feet away from her except where a front or rear cross was involved. As we moved up to more advanced coursework, my distance from her began to shift; in some cases, shifting considerably. These days, I find myself having to work hard to support jumps when I am far enough away from her that she begins to pull in to me.

All of this brings me back to last Saturday morning, when I was most emphatically not having a zone run. In fact, in an Elite Regular round, when all Viva had to do was run straight from her weave exit to a jump and turn left to execute a second jump, I managed to pull her off her line. How hard it is to let one's dog go straight? (Don't answer that; sometimes it's a lot harder for me than other times, especially if there's distance work in play. Also, don't get me wrong; we were having a heck of a lot of fun, and came home with a fistful of qualifying and first-place ribbons anyway.) After we finished the run, I pulled out my record book, and made some notes. As I was writing, "Ask Annelise or Jacque what the best body language is to keep Viva going straight as I move left," I realized I knew exactly what the best body language was to keep Viva going straight under those circumstances. I needed to keep my shoulders facing the direction I wanted her to go, extend my arm to support the jump, and run left on a diagonal path. Ah, running on a diagonal. I suck at this. Strike that. Optimistically speaking, I find running on a diagonal physically counter-intuitive, which would suggest I need to practice it.

Practice, in agility, seems to mean both the act of practicing an activity for eventual use in class or at a trial, and the act of practicing the identification of locations on course, real or hypothetical, at which said activity would be useful. During the walk-through of Saturday's Elite Jumpers course, I spotted a couple of locations where I thought diagonal movement on my part would be useful. During our run, I duly noted that diagonal movement on my part would have been useful in those locations. Yep, I'd failed to move diagonally at either of them. Sigh. My shoulders really like to face the direction I'm going.

Between Saturday's Elite Jumpers run and Sunday's Elite Jumpers run, I had a talk with my shoulders. It turned into more of a discussion, really, what with me suggesting that my shoulders had been facing the way my body was moving pretty much every day of my life for more than four decades and wouldn't they like to try something new and different, and my shoulders countering that they were just looking out for my physical welfare, specifically that of my face and my ass, neither of which share a fondness for ending up flattened on cold, April ground. I asked my shoulders to give me a mite more credit for maintaining my balance, what with those years of childhood ballet and all, and they noted, in only a mildly snarky fashion, that I had lost my balance at the end of a Regular run that very Saturday and my left knee had the grass stains and bruises to prove it. In the end, it was the knee that persuaded the shoulders to lighten up, give peace a chance, and go along with this running-on-a-diagonal thing, at least for Elite Jumpers.

As Viva and I can attest, the shoulders came through on course with flying colors. I managed to run on a diagonal at both locations I had scouted for doing so, and Viva responded with what I swear was an "About time you figured this out" burst of speed. It wasn't our fastest jumpers run ever, but it was fast for grass and, given the curves on this particular course, might well have been a jumpers canine best. And the coolest part? We're nearing the zone again. I think this running-diagonally business has us on the verge of a breakthrough, a fluid connection that will persist despite changes in handler-dog distance. More on than in the next post . . .