Last weekend, Bear and I were entered in our first 2 day agility trial in many years. We were entered in gamblers, snooker, standard and jumpers on Saturday and gamblers, steeplechase, standard and jumpers on Sunday. I was unsure what the weekend would be like, especially since we had missed the last two classes before the trial.
8 runs over the weekend and most runs were less than a minute long. This means less than 10 minutes of work in the ring but the 12 hour days left us both exhausted. I won’t bore you with the run by run details breakdown because I think I sum the weekend up fairly easily.
Photo by Marne Birch
Needs Improvement (I’m not using the word ‘bad’ anymore)
- A bit of wandering, sniffing and general drifting from Bear, especially in Gamblers on the send out.
- We only accomplished one weave entry out of 5 all weekend.
- Arriving at 7am and finishing at 7pm was a long, tiring day.
- Our distance work is non-existent in the gamble. I know we can do these distances in practice but after running the opening sequence Bear is a bit over the top which means lots of barking at me and not so much looking for the obstacle.
Good
- No barking and lunging in/out and around the rings in a very busy trial environment.
- No apparent lameness – and I was stretching poking and prodding.
- 100% on all contacts with a couple of rear crosses, something relatively new to us.
- All the rear crosses in jumpers worked well for us I am glad we got to do a lot of work on them in class.
- No knocked bars.
- 3 qualifying runs
- 1 Starters Snooker Q (first of 2)
- 1 Starters Jumpers Q (second of 2, on to Advanced Jumpers)
- 1 Advanced Standard Q (first of 3)
I did not get any video recordings, but my friend Marne took some lovely photos during our qualifying Advanced Standard run.
Photo by Marne Birch
Work Ahead
It is really clear to me that whatever 2×2 weave work we had done before is completely gone. Bear always got the weaves on the second try so it’s not the weaving but the entry that’s an issue. I am pretty sure I said I would work on weaves after the last trial and guess what, I didn’t – so I can’t really expect much improvement.
Now that we are at the Advanced level in just about every class, weave entries are going to determine weather we qualify or not.
Our next trial is another local one in November – I need to remember to get the 2x2s out of the garage and do some work!
Ayoka Bubar BA, CPDT-KA 