No pain, no gain?

Today was our monthly Houston Frisbeedog meeting, and we learned:

1. How to teach Duke to jump over my leg to catch a frisbee. Kneel down so I'm on my right foot and left knee. Another person was standing just in front of me touching my right knee to keep Duke from going around, and then used the frisbee to lure Duke to jump over my right leg. Duke already knows a command to jump over my leg, so it was just putting the frisbee and jumping over together. That didn't go so well at first. He'd jump over my leg, headbutting the frisbee. He didn't quite understand that he was supposed to take the frisbee out of my hand. After a few tries, I tossed the frisbee, and he jumped over and grabbed the frisbee like he was supposed to. Unfortunately, I got kicked or smacked around by his tail several times in the process.

2. Some crazy throw between the legs. I should have realized bad things were to come when the first step to doing this trick was to bend over. Bend over at the waist with bent knees, hands at 12 and 6 on the frisbee, and then swing arms through legs while spinning the disc. I swung with a little more enthusiasm than necessary, and my arm hit my inner leg with more than enough force to leave a bruise. Practice repeatedly until legs and arms are numb. Sigh sadly because the frisbee always landed 5 feet (or less) away.

3. Another crazy throw where you bounce the frisbee off the ground. Because the Jawz frisbee is so much heavier than the normal club frisbees, I needed to throw the frisbee HARD in order to get it to bounce. The most I got it to bounce was an inch. Darn my weenie chicken arms.

4. Throwing the frisbee between my legs. Right step, left step, then a right lunge while reaching my right hand behind my right knee and releasing the frisbee. As you can probably tell from my misadventures in throw #2, I am not very well coordinated. And very quickly had a sore wrist from wildly flinging my wrist into the back of my knee. While painful, this was actually pretty easy to catch onto.

5. An upsidedown throw. Start by holding the frisbee pretty much vertical (hand at 6 o'clock), and a quick wrist flick with a little angle, and my frisbee wobbled off upside down. This one was suprisingly hard on my weak little wrist, but that might also be because it had just taken a beating from the last throw.

Also worked on throwing the frisbee so that it arched right over Duke, to get him to do a little flippy thing. But I didn't include it on the list because it didn't cause bodily injury to me.