Two Sundays Ago

So this is, oh, two weeks overdue. Yeah.. sorry about that.

But now that I'm stuck in the house with a nasty ear/nose/throat cold yucky icky thing that I probably caught while volunteering in the Physical Therapy department of a nursing home, I have no excuse not to update.

Thankfully, the agility gods must have read my last blog post and rewarded me with a great day of agility the next day. It was quite a long and busy day, actually, so I guess it didn't leave me time to get upset about the snarky people at the trial.

The reason it was so action packed was because I had double the work to do! I had two dogs with me - my own lovely MargeDog as well as one of her best friends, Spirit, the Golden Retriever, who I ran and qualified with last December. I'm also her dog walker, which makes me one of her favorite people in the world.

The Jumpers course was lovely and I knew it when I walked it (which isn't always a good thing - it usually leads to me not qualifying!). However, Marge totally rocked all of my rear crosses and powered through the course, picking up 8 MACH points and her second MXJ leg.

Spirit, too, had a lovely run with me. I handled it exactly the same way as I did with Marge, and, aside from her one error (popping out early at the weaves), I actually thought her run was nicer than Marge's. If you want to see the run, you can find it here.

Next was Standard, that class that Marge and I just can't seem to qualify in. Unfortunately, in this run, we were extremely close. If she would have held on to the teeter for literally another second before bailing, we would have qualified. Unfortunately, this was a new teeter that squeaked at the tipping point, so Marge was startled. I think that's why she bailed.

But there is a lot of good in this run.  Look at how close the freaking judge is to Marge while she's on the A-Frame - and notice that she doesn't even look at him!  She did notice him when she got to the table, but I kept verbally praising her and tried to position myself so that I was kind of in between the table and the judge.  She also hit that really difficult weave entrance, which I am SO proud of her for.




Spirit ran very well, also. But she, too, did not qualify. In her case, hopping the dog walk contact and incurring a refusal at the weave entrance (which was EXTREMELY tricky) prevented a clean run. Her video is here.

After Spirit's run, we stuck around to see Amy and Layla's Standard run, and then headed home.  I really don't know how the heck I would have managed to get two large dogs and two large dog crates back to the car without Louie and Amy's help.  I can see why all of these top agility handlers like working out of the car so much!

And that was our weekend! I would have liked to qualify more than once out of the 6 attempts that I had all weekend (and really wanted to bring home a ribbon to Spirit's momma), but, aside from Marge's zoomy run on the first day of the trial, I had 5 really solid runs with my two girls. I was so glad that Sunday was a pleasant and fun agility day - which is how it should be!

Our next trial is the trial that I kind of flipped out at last year. It's still about 3 or 4 weeks away, I think. It still remains my worst weekend of agility ever, but, because the both of us (ESPECIALLY me) have done a little growing up since last year (in addition to the fact that they will not be using the automatic table counter), I was willing to give it one more shot. If this year goes icky, too, we'll sit this trial out for good.  It ain't worth the stress!