Silvia Trkman

Last February, I enrolled as an auditor in one of Silvia Trkman's online classes, Handling I.  After waiting for what seemed like an eternity for the snow to melt, I was able to set up the first course and run the two exercises.  Keep in mind, I had watched at least a dozen people tackle these courses before I had a chance to run them, and I was really excited.  Unfortunately, I discovered I was not fast enough to get where I had to be for a couple of the moves, and Belle's distance skills did not include being sent to the back of a jump from 30 feet away.  After knocking my head against a wall for a week or so, I put the course aside.

Last week, I was looking for something different after working on several of Craig Josling's AKC courses.  I took a peek at the second set of exercises in Silvia's class and decided we could probably do those, so I set it up.  I was thrilled that we did a fairly credible job with the two courses, but I decided it really would be nice to get some feedback.  I contacted Silvia and she allowed me to pay the difference and become an online participant.

Silvia has a fantastic eye and does not try to make one solution fit every team.  She is also fantastically prompt in responding to her students' posts!  (I'll go out on a limb here and say that I suspect Silvia enjoys teaching almost as much as she loves training and running her dogs.)

This is my final video submission to Silvia for the second set of exercises.  I wanted to share it with you because of the song I used for backing.  (I almost never mute the original voice track in my videos, but today was excessively windy, and the voice track is useless.)  "Without You" expresses so well how I feel about my wonderful little red dog.  Unfortunately, the rights to the song that I dubbed in preclude YouTube from allowing the video to be shown in just about every country in the world.  I swapped in one of YouTube's lame offerings which should allow my video to be seen.  However, if you would like to hear the song I originally wanted to back this video, simply click on both videos below and mute mine.  It isn't the Usher version, but these two guys do a very nice job of it.