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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
2 Comments
Carol Schmitt · September 9, 2016 at 1:33 am
I love how Griffin is totally focused on you in every picture!
afmd7525 · September 12, 2016 at 12:17 am
Yes! He looks the same in every one!
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