TitleMania: Our Agility!

Click here for an overview of the event. Click here for general agility. Click here for Rally!

We signed up for the whole agility tournament – 3 standard, 3 jumpers, 3 snooker, 3 gamblers. I also entered the Masters Challenge classes on Sunday – thinking that I would be sad if we had to pull due ot the busy environment or being tired but that I woudl be more sad if he was running well and we didn’t try it.

Standard:  We ran clean on 2 of the 3 runs – I’m fairly certain we NQ’d due to his collar being left on.  Some of the runs were in a particular ring that, by Sunday, he really needed to smell a very specific area.  I will admit there was a moment where I ran around the whole set of 12 weave poles to try and persuade him to continue on.

A very unusual standard – look at 3-4! We did it!

Snooker: The first two courses were great – but we had a back jump over a red in one and an off course tunnel in another. The third Snooker course seemed very, very difficult to find any clear path so we went for an adventurous high-point option. I chose a handling strategy that heavily employed our obedience heeling as well as front position to get us between tricky spots. Funny enough, the ‘hard’ course is one where we Q’d with a great score.

Two 7’s and a five. I had Griffin in front position going between jumps 5 and 2 to take him over to the 7’s. It was amazing! I can’t believe we did it!

Gamblers:  This is our best game – it combines two things we’re good at – points and distance.  We do really well with points games because I like the stragegy of finding the higher-point paths, plus griffin is reasonably fast and doesn’t have any obviously weak obstacles, making anything possible. We’re also great at distance work so I don’t usually worry about low-level gambles. We Q’d all three runs and with great scores.

Jumpers:  Two good runs and one was an NQ – I think I missed a jump when I ended up so much further ahead than I anticipated. The jumpers courses were all really great – tempting off courses.

How is this not fun?!

Masters Challenge: I’ve not run this class before. I didn’t really read the rules.  When it came time to walk the course on Sunday I got a little intimidated by all the very experienced teams there. I knew some from our region and others are names I recognize from youtube videos and from lists of big-event results. I got worried someone would ask why I was in there for the course walk so I only walked it twice, quickly.   It ended up being very fine, the ‘hard’ parts were all in our skill set. We ended up with an off course when I forgot where we were going, but looking at our time later, if we hadn’t had that we would have been within time.  Masters Challenge Jumpers was great too – so, so exciting to have a dog with the training and skills to do it.  After getting through one tricky spot I paused and that again got us an off course.  These were two of my favorite runs all weekend because

We can do it!

As this was a different type of event, there were overall awards of various types using formulas about Q’s and points and time and I only glanced over it.  On Saturday morning I was warming up Griffin and then found a tick on his belly.  As I was pulling it off – we were called up for PII Snooker awards – even with just one of three qualifying scores!

PII Snooker dog of the year runner-up!

And so I then knew to check results to avoid an embarassing run across the room and through the crowd.

Saturday morning: PII Standard Dog of the Year!

And PI Gamblers!

And, on Sunday, Jumpers PII runner up.

The other golden is a ‘cousin’ to Griffin – but actually more closely related to Tonks.

So while part of it was “making less mistakes than everyone else”  but also he did a really great job considering the conditions, environment, heat, and our experience level at actual trials.  I left the event seriously considering getting a ‘real’ job so I can have weekends free for trials and more time for training.  And it definitely made this starters/advanced team want to work towards bigger events. Griffin doesn’t have many years of agility left – but I’m feeling a lot more optimistic about our skills.

I think this is a great event to get starters teams addicted to agility and wanting to work towards more.