FAST

If you have been reading my blog, you might recall me talking about the FAST event in agility. If you never read it, or you don't remember it, it is OKAY.... really.

Anyway, I have a video of us doing an actual FAST class from the last trial so you can see how it really works. You may recall the "send bonus" is the key. To qualify, you have to complete the entire send bonus and then get as many points as you can besides that... in 32 seconds. Different obstacles have different point values depending on how hard they are or how far out of the "flow" you have to go to get to them. ANYWAY, I've grabbed this frame from the video to highlight the send bonus:

The yellow line is the line that the handler cannot cross, and the orange arrows show the jumps and the directions that the dog must take them. The yellow line is actually about 20 feet from the jumps. So, Maggie goes out on the first one, back over the second and then out again on the third. When you see the video, you will see that she doesn't do this cleanly... she actually returns 1/2 way to me between the 2nd and 3rd jumps. But because I don't cross the line, and she does them correctly, we still qualified. So take a look at the video and see if it makes a little more sense. If not, don't worry... I don't think I understood FAST until after we had been running it for a while.