Adventures in Dogwalking: Thunder

Fresh from his appearance on Global Tv, Thunder was raring to go for his walk today. After surviving his many, many excitable episodes on Monday, I was determined to start teaching him to calm down and focus his energy on other activities.
As before, when the coordinator brought him out for me, he was already trying to jump up all over everyone. Immediately, we defended ourselves while repeating what is becoming a mantra when walking with Thunder: "Off!" "Noo!" "Oww!" My foundation for his "training" (I use this term loosely because, hell, let's face it I'm amateur at best) was to offset his sparky energy with my own calm energy, plus focus on obedience basics with clicker training (another way to focus his energy while teaching and tiring him out; remember, a tired dog is a happy dog!).
One of the SPCA officers gave me a little tip for dealing with Thunder: if he gets overly rambunctious, pull his leash up a little to get him to sit. Although I preferred not to use this method, especially as it seemed like Thunder already knew how to sit on his own, when he got into his little frenzies his attention was really hard to divert, so this method worked well to divert his energy in those situations. (Note: this is not yanking or jerking the leash up really hard, just gently pulling the leash straight up so the dog has to lower its rear to regain it's balance).
Early in our walk, Thunder started jumping on my for no reason again, but each time he started I would stop walking and push him down firmly while saying "No!" only once or twice, then put him into a 'sit.' After he sat there looking calmly at me, I would give him a gentle neck massage, or start walking again, hopefully to get him to associate being calm with being rewarded (or at the very least, being in a 'sit' with getting rewarded). I'm happy to say that it seemed to work, because for the next two hours his excitable episodes were more sporadic than Mondays' walk. That's not to say he didn't jump up on me still (including the time I was crouched down next to him while he was drinking from his water dish, and while I was conversing with another volunteer he took the opportunity to jump on my head), but the episodes seemed shorter and not as frequent as last time.
I was also very pleased when I took him into one of the pens to play: on Monday, I was concerned about him running in really fast circles around the perimeter of the pen. Today, he circled around two or three times, but after I enticed his attention with a frisbee, he calmed down so much! Of course, he didn't know how to fetch so he would just run after the frisbee, and when it stopped rolling, he lost interest, but once in a while he would just sit down and look at me as if saying, "What now?" He also wanted to meet all the dogs that passed by: no aggression, some fence running (boo), but at the very least he only wanted to play with everyone, and it showed most of the time in his body language. He was also very nice in meeting some of the dogs face to face, and there was a lot of nose licking that happened.
And finally, FINALLY, he started accepting treats! Treats are a major stepping stone to starting clicker training (although they aren't the only reward that will work, and really, they shouldn't be the only reward for clicker training to work). I brushed up on 'sit' with him, and started teaching him 'down.' When he lays down, he kind of curls himself into a little circle; need I tell you it was very cute? Plus he is very cuddly: a few times he would come over and nuzzle himself into my arms. But then he'd get all excited and happy and then try to jump all over me again.
My next goal for him is to try to teach him some games; all the more fun things to do to burn off some of that energy! And of course, keep trying to re-enforce the whole "jumping on people and nipping them is bad" thing!