Article Published: 20 March 2011
By Rassie Erasmus

The Only Applause That Matters.

I have been thinking for a while now on how to explain in simple words, the information I want to share with you that can bring you closer to making your birds win.

It was the moment the young man had waited for and had prepared for over many months. It was his premiere appearance as a concert pianist. The audience had heard a lot about his amazing talent and they packed out this prestigious concert hall to hear him. They weren't disappointed. In fact, his masterful playing brought them to their feet for a thunderous standing ovation at the end of the concert. Backstage, the young man's manager said, "They want an encore, man! Get out there!" The pianist looked strangely dejected, and he said, "No, I'm not going back out there." His manager said, "But they love you, man! Look at them! They're all on their feet!" "Not all," was all the young man could say. "Look in the balcony." The manager peeked around the curtain and he saw one white-haired old man in the balcony who wasn't standing or applauding. "Hey, come on! That's one old man! So what?" The pianist looked down at the floor and he said, "That's not one old man. That's my teacher."

In other words, you must become the teacher of your birds, and the teacher of your mind. To teach your birds is hard work, it takes time and discipline to get this part done. It cost patience and more patience and sometimes it looks like an impossible task to train them, but eventually they will be trained to trap with the first landing (valuable time during a race can be lost here). There are many ways to train the birds around the loft and much more on how to do road training. But now you need to teach your own mind, more training = more feeding, more vitamins, thus you must put back what you take out. There must be a perfect balance between input and output to enable your birds to be in a top condition before the first race. Why do you always respect the winner of a race and think that this specific bird is the best bird in your loft just to find out that on the next race, this bird came last. You are going to sit my friend and wonder what went wrong right.

So here is some advice for teaching your mind
Short distance 200 to 400 km
Middle distance 400 to 600 km
Long distance 600 to 1000 km and above.

In a next article I will explain my opinion, experience and thoughts about these three distances including that I know for a fact that young birds can win old birds without training them to break away. I am also of the opinion that it is a waste of money to start training young birds before the first race for further than 100 km, further more if this is true, then why should you toss the birds the birds every Saturday 150 to 200 km?

I included a time table to make you start thinking about training. If you or the Truck release the birds at 07:00 on a 200 km flight/Toss then the arrival time will be very close to 09:34 as indicated on the table.

I hope that's where you're looking for your approval. Anything is worth doing to get that, nothing is worth losing it.

Rassie

[View Time Table]