Autumn already!

My feet seem to have hardly had time to touch the ground this year, I am working harder than ever and for longer hours... most weekdays the alarm goes off just before six, I get up, leave home, and am rarely back before at least 10:30pm. Bit gutted that despite this I am about to spend a second winter without heating in my house as I can't afford to get it fixed. Apart from having more work in my day job than ever, I have also taken on some evening agility teaching. After some initial teething troubles and stress, things have settled down and I feel very lucky to have such a lovely group of people and dogs to work with. As the summer competitions are drawing to a close, I am now asking lots of questions to prepare my training over the winter. The kind of questions I am asking myself now are, are my foundations strong enough? From Susan Garrett's blog:
'The Three Crucial Keys to Agility Greatness'
She says: 'So you want to know what I view as the three most important things in creating a great agility dog? Foundation, foundation, foundation.'
Similarly, from Dave Munnings: 'The more I learn and the more I teach, the more I realise the importance of foundation.'
And from the Olympic British Cycling coaches: 'the ethos has been to make small gains in all areas, which result in major gains in performance... the devilishly fast times are in the detail.'
I already have quite a list of agility related things to work on, but I will also be revisiting many other things over the winter. Apart from working on agility performance, my dogs will be getting at least six weeks away from agility completely, and during this time I will be looking at general fitness, body awareness, focus (espceially working on counter-conditioning Zazzy to situations that she finds testing), drive, and self control.