Scott Glen has been training and trialing border collies to herd sheep and cattle for more than twenty years. In 1997 he turned his hobby into a full-time job, creating Alta-Pete Stockdogs, where he takes dogs in for training. His wife, Jenny, a former veterinary technician and animal trainer for Hollywood motion pictures, has been trialing for ten years. When not traveling around the country competing and giving clinics, Scott and Jenny live in New Dayton, Alberta, Canada.
Finals?
Hmmm. When I was asked to write about the preparation my husband, Scott Glen, and I do for the National Finals, I had to stop and think. Our season of trialing hasn’t even started, so to talk about preparation for the Finals seems kind of out of our focus for right now. However, most of our Finals prep is similar to our trial season prep. Scott has been doing this for more than twenty years. In 2001 he was the National Reserve Champion with his bitch, Fly, and in 2004 he was both the National Champion and Reserve National Champion with littermates Pleat and Tala. In addition, he was Reserve National Nursery Champion with Terry Scheaffer’s Mick in 2006 and National Nursery Champion with his young dog Don in 2009.
Don makes his debut in the Open class of the National Finals in Virginia last year.
Needless to say, you would think he has a set plan for this trial prep. Well, I can tell you he doesn’t. His plans change from year to year based on the individual needs of the dogs, and with an open mind he learns and listens to others and observes their success and failures. This year, Scott will be returning to our short trial season in the Open class with the same team of dogs he had last year, Maid and Don. He knows them both pretty well by now, although Maid has had some changes in her training to help smooth her out. Scott’s approach with Don has been more about helping him grow and expanding his experience. Don already has several points from trials he attended late in the summer and fall and likely has enough to run at the Finals. Maid needs to earn a few more but is knocking at the door of qualification.
Scott and Maid persuade the sheep to go in the pen.
The opposite of this are my two open dogs. Lad has no points yet, and Hemp has a whopping 1. They will need to be very ready for the spring and early summer trials. Total trials we have coming up to qualify with: 5. Ten times to the post (the nursery dogs have fifteen times). I need to make them count. The mental game is one that lays heavy on me. Will I qualify? I don’t know. I am starting this year with fewer points than I ever have, and a monkey on my back that is carried over from the bad trial season I had last year. I feel better about this year, but there isn’t much time to get into the groove of trialing before the days to qualify are over.
Jenny sheds with Lad at the 2009 Finals in Oregon
Scott doesn’t worry about such things. Sure, his talent takes him a long way, but part of that is how he thinks about every run. He doesn’t dwell on the last run when there is a new one in front of him. It’s not that he doesn’t learn from his last mistake, but he doesn’t carry it with him to the post. And if the dog is working better, worse, or different than it usually does, he doesn’t panic. “Run the dog you have that day,” he says to me. This is something I have to put into play often, as my Hemp dog constantly challenges and surprises me (for good and bad). Scott walks to the post serious but light-hearted. You will often see him joking with people before his run. Don’t think this means he’s not focused; it’s just that he’s not going to let his nerves rule his course.
Scott’s nursery dogs are still up in the air. He will start the season with Reba, June, Tam, and Bracken and whittle them down to the top two. The best two go to the Finals, and it doesn’t matter if they are customer dogs or owned by us. He’s feeling pretty confident about this year’s contenders, but they haven’t even been to their first trial yet. The first one is usually a doozy. Most of the dogs we will be competing against have been trialing since early winter. We have a friend who told us that when he sees Scott’s babies at their first trial, they look like a mess, but then when he sees them again two weeks later at the Bluegrass, they come to play.
Scott and June training for the summer.
Prepping the dogs physically for trialing starts in late winter. The nursery dogs have been training hard on a daily basis since November and are pretty fit, but they need that extra conditioning so that when things get difficult out on the trial field, they aren’t thinking about how tired they are. If their bodies are fit, their minds can be free to think about the tasks in front of them. Our conditioning is done by road working them with a quad. Scott varies his routine. Sometimes he runs them at the end of the day; sometimes he runs them before he works them. It depends on what is going on in their training. Occasionally, he takes them for a couple of laps around our sixty-five-acre field, but most of the time he takes them down our gravel road, running them three to five miles. In addition to getting them fit, the dogs can use the time to let down and have some fun while enjoying their companionship with Scott.
My conditioning is a little different. Hemp is a sprint dog. If he is allowed to run loose with a quad, he will race ahead and lay down until you get there. On the field he is the same way, and his head races just as fast as his body, wearing him out before the fetch is done. Last year, I decided he needed to learn to lope or trot for an extended period of time. Holding onto a leash while managing a quad was tricky so I put him in a sled dog harness and attached a rope to the front of the quad and taught him to run in front. The idea was not to teach him to pull, although I do want him to keep the line taught, but to control his pace by the speed I put the quad at. He’s no longer able to sprint ahead but must maintain the steady pace I choose for him. I saw good results in his stamina on the field last year after training him this way. Once Hemp learned his new job, I added Laddie to the harness and tug line, too. He is a lazy runner and would prefer to lag behind and sniff and pee rather than keep up. Yelling at him only upset Hemp, so the only thing to do was hook him up, and he now keeps up with our run. The extra benefit to running my two like this was the mental aspect. They both can run four miles out of the harness easier than they can in it, but in the harness there is no goofing around. They have to concentrate on what they are doing, and they tire easier than if they were just racing back and forth. I consider it a continuation of their training on the field, and I usually only go two miles, sometimes pushing it to three.
Hemp and Lad in their harnesses with Jenny
As the summer progresses, our dogs don’t get much down time. Training will be done in the mornings, and quad work is usually done in the evening right up to the Finals. Scott will pick his two nursery dogs in July (assuming they all have qualified) and concentrate on cleaning up all of their work. Hopefully, if everything works out, they will peak at the right time and make a good showing at the Nationals.
Scott and Jenny are getting ready to begin their trial season in Colorado next month. You can follow their progress at home at Alta-Pete Farm Tails and on the trial field at the Alta-Pete Trial Blog.