Trial Weekend 8/30-8/31

It seemed like a good idea to do a day of agility and then a day of rally – and while the dogs thought that was great, it wasn’t the best for me.

Last Friday we left at 5:30 to head down to Cincinnati for a CPE agility trial.  Some parts went well, other runs had us adding many  more skills to our “to-do” list.  It was very much Griffin’s way to qualify with very good scores (1st places – I will admit he was the only dog in his class/height who qualified!) or non-qualifying scores/dismissals.  The dogs all thought it was a good day. We were sitting out at the car reading for most of the day other than those little pieces where I was inside with Griffin to run him.   We’re now in level 4 for the distance game, “Jackpot.”

After the trial we made our long drive up to Columbus to clean the building for the WCRL rally trial we were hosting.  In only about 3 hours and with a few helpers we vacuumed the whole big room, mopped it, set the ring, organized the holders, pulled the signs, and prepped all the ribbons and score sheets.

We got to sleep in and leave at 6AM to get to the building for a last little bit of clean up and set up before the trial.   Our trial secretary (and my 2-3x a week training buddy) from April found out she was moving one month before THIS trial so we had quickly retrained a few new people. It was so nice to see that even without rally experience, we had sufficient and great stewards to run the event.

We had a small number of exhibitors but many accomplishments, an ARCH, ARCHX, L1x5 and a lot of new titles.

My dogs also had a good day.

• Griffin finished his Level 2 title
• Blaze (just barely) finished his level 2 title
• Blaze ran away on a few runs but came back
• Blaze had a perfect score on a Level 1 course
• Griffin and I got our first Level 3 leg
• Griffin completely stayed with me and had beautiful heeling on each run.
• Blaze, at 12.5 years old, had the endurance to do 5 runs (entered in 6 – I’m not counting the one where he left the ring between the start sign and the first sign!).  We did our first (junior handler) competition when he was only 6 months old!

And the best part?  One of my students consistently had better scores than us.   I love that!

Here’s Griffin on a beautiful run: