Mailbag
Sarah here! People loved the Trial Density Map I made and shared last week, so I wanted to answer the most common question that came in. The biggest one was about how the miles were calculated. Those are “as the crow flies” miles, not actual driving miles. That’s a limitation of the readily available distance APIs, but the map should still give you a good general idea of what’s available to you even if the mileage isn’t exact, especially when you zoom in on your own location.
Several of you noticed the difference when you looked up your most common show sites, but this response was my favorite: “What it fails to consider is the major bay in between the two places. So what could be a 30 minute drive is actually closer to a 3 hour drive most days! It really makes me wish we invented flying cars by now. Until then I’m forced to drive around or spend almost $100 for a ferry one-way.”
š® Thatās some dedication.
Uninformed Optimism
This week we did something we have never done before: we taped a podcast live on video in front of an audience. People who joined us got to see exactly how an episode comes together, including watching us botch the intro right out of the gate and start over. We also have super secret hand signals we use to communicate during taping (oh the beauty of thumbs). This episode kicks off our new Run Happy series on the Emotional Cycle of Change, which we will be applying to dog agility.
The cycle has five stages, which we reviewed with our live audience. You start with Uninformed Optimism, where everything feels possible because you do not yet know what you do not know (hello, running contacts). Then reality sets in and you slide into Informed Pessimism, where the process is harder than you expected and your initial timeline isnāt realistic. At the bottom sits the Valley of Despair, where you doubt yourself, your dog, and whether any of this is worth it. The handlers who push through reach Informed Optimism, where you finally understand the process and you start getting somewhere. Finally, you reach Success and Fulfillment, where the joy comes back deeper than before because you have indeed suffered.
The live audience made the whole thing a little spicy! The chat was active from start to finish, we had a blast, and we are doing it two more times over the next week.
Click here to listen to the edited podcast.
Click here to watch the live taping, mistakes included (I like to call them ābonus featuresā).
The Valley of Despair
Remember in The Princess Bride when Westley wakes up in the Pit of Despair?
Westley: Where am I?
The Albino: The Pit of Despair! Don’t even think about trying to escape.
(Westley is spelled correctly, per IMDb and the fans. We looked it up so you don’t have to.)
The Emotional Cycle of Change calls it a valley and the movie calls it a pit, but the experience is the same. You wake up one day and you wonder why you ever thought you could teach your dog running contacts. You are in the Valley/Pit of Despair.
The second episode of our Run Happy series tapes live on video Thursday at 7 pm CDT, and we are going deep into the Valley of Despair: what it actually looks like in agility, why it happens, and why it does not mean what most handlers think it means (much like the word āinconceivableā). Come watch the taping, jump into the chat, and help us get through the intro on the first try this time.
š Thursday (June 4th) at 7PM CDT, live on Facebook or YouTube.
š To watch on Facebook, click here and mark Going or Interested:
CLICK HERE TO WATCH ON FACEBOOK
š No Facebook? Click here and mark Notify Me to watch on YouTube:
CLICK HERE TO WATCH ON YOUTUBE
Spider-Noir
Before we talk about spiders, I want to give my one line review of The Mandalorian and Grogu: it was good, it was enjoyable, but it was not amazing. The movie earned an A- CinemaScore and an 89% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest of any Star Wars film of the Disney era, but the box office numbers tell a very different story. After a $98 million domestic opening over the long Memorial Day weekend, the movie dropped nearly 70% in its second weekend and sits at around $246 million worldwide, well short of the $500 to $600 million it reportedly needs to break even.
Now, before we talk about Spider-Man, go to Google and type in āSpider-Noirā into the search bar and scroll down on your phone or computer! That will give you the vibe for the series.
Spider-Noir snuck up on me without much fanfare, and I think it’s quite the find (93% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes). Nicolas Cage stars as an aging private investigator named Ben Reilly in 1930s New York with a secret past as the city’s one and only superhero. The series comes from the same team behind the animated Spider-Verse movies, where Cage first voiced the background character, and it’s his first starring role in a TV series. Iād always thought of him as a movie star, and my favorite Nicolas Cage movies are Face/Off and The Rock. Yes, from the 90s.
It comes in black and white or color, and I wanted to watch it in color but got outvoted 2-1. Then Hannah relented and said every time we resumed the series, we would switch back and forth between color and black and white, and now we’re just watching it in color because she likes it better. Cage is excellent as The Spider, but I’d say so are several of the others including actress Li Jun Li, who brings a lot of real depth to her character. This series was spawned by the Spider-Verse movies, and we weren’t sure how good it would be, but we are really enjoying it. Having said that, we are only about halfway through.
What skill put you in the Valley of Despair? Email us at team@baddogagility.com.
Happy Training,
