Agility Club

I do actually have a video finally... but I haven't uploaded it yet. I must try and do this soon but the week is flying by and I have soooooooooo much to do at work, I think I'll need the Thursday of KC to sleep and recover.

Well we were in Kent on the Friday before Agility Club so coming up from that way to Ardingly. And a pedestrian had for some reason chosen Saturday morning to walk up the motorway and get run over, so they shut the motorway between two junctions, in both directions. Lots of traffic and Garth’s own diversion later to avoid the car par park that was the official diversion, we arrived at Ardingly at 8.40. Just in time for Imogen to walk her first champ, and just not in time for me to walk the 6-7 Olympia. Now, the 6-7 Olympia I had chosen to be the one class out of the 3 agility’s I had this weekend to go for – not so much to qualify for, but to gage how Scandal faired against some of the top class 6 and 7 dogs. I loved Simon Peachey’s course, big and spread out, there were a couple of bits I was unsure about how to handle, and I went through these with Tracy F, studied the course for a while until I was confident how I was going to play it, and then we were off. Scandal seems to have gone up another notch in confidence levels and decided that she was going to adopt a new form of startline wait, a crouch, a cross between a down and a sit. She was fantastic, good grief I love her sooo much! Everything I asked her to do she did as fast as her little socks could take her. I told her ‘poles’ and she drove to them, and even though she was driving to pole number 2 or 3 when she realised where the first was she pulled herself round to make sure she got it. Ahhhh she was good. She went into the lead, and held it through the rest of the class. She won it by 1.5 seconds. Cripes, that little girl is a good baby.

Scandal’s other class was a G6/7 jumping and I took my own line to give her a blast. She came out of her weaves as I was pulling off them, but got them 2nd time round.

Sunday, we took our own line in the G6 Agility as I wanted to practice aframe weaves, which she nailed, and then seesaw with me racing her, which she tried to hold on to with her tail, so she went back on that. And then she did a lovely running dog walk to finish yay! G6 Jumping, Barrie James’ course, loved it, and Scandal loved it too and won it! There were a couple of turns we need to work on as Scandal didn’t put a neat check stride in, but she felt like she was motoring.

The Crufts Singles was our last run and probably the only one this year where I’ve thought ahhhhh, help. Scandal thought she knew best :O she did a lovely sequence at the start of tunnel under aframe and very sharp turn into the weaves. I was going to train this class anyway as have no intention of trying to qualify her for Crufts ’12. So I raced her dog walk, telling her to target, and she just ran straight through the contact over the next jump! Just completely thought I’d told her to run it (or, whatever, she thought she was doing the right thing). So she went back on that, and then we did 3 jumps to seesaw on our way out, and Scandal ran straight through that too! At this point I picked her up and left the ring. Well, well, well. I kind of knew that as I’d pushed a few of her grade 6 agilitys and the class on Saturday that I’d have to train a few for a while, but didn’t quite expect Scandal to do that. All fun though! Looks like we will be training all our agility’s over the next few weeks!

I did two runs with Honey, the Crufts Singles and Olympia. And…. She won the Singles and came 2nd in the Olympia!!!!!! This should hopefully give her enough points for the Crufts Singles now, and also qualifies her for the Olympia semis. Good span.

Imogen ran Honey for the first time in 4 months and despite only being allowed to train twice since April they did some great stuff, Honey having 5f in the champ jumping and then an E in the agililty (Honey in her own little world after the dw). They then regained their confidence for the Agility Club Junior Over 12 Finals in the evening and won it, and Tia came 3rd with 5f! They also had 2 fab runs on the Sunday, one judge giving Imi a judges special for great handling :-) with just a small error in both classes. Imi ran Tia in the Singles and got a lot further than we did, Tia just running round a jump. Hopefully she will be able to do some classes at KC Fest.

We've just had a weekend off... what a novelty. Honey is currently on 'Ruff Love' after running off AGAIN after we trained last week. She was gone for ages and it was dark by the time we found her. I was convinced she had been stolen as there was a suspicious looking car that had gone by the time we'd gone back to take the number plate. Stupid spaniel was found later in the night, in the woods, happy as larry, not at all worried! So, she's on lead, or in her cage / puppy pen. Makes me realise how demanding she is as she's always pawing, clawing, jumping up, barking, whining, etc etc. When she's on a lead she's on a headcollar so she can't tow me. We trained once on Saturday for 2 mins, and she was great, very enthusiastic (and promptly tried to run off before I could catch her again). I find this sooooo hard to do as my dogs get lots of freedom, so this is a bit of a culture shock to us both. Still, better that than a stolen-spaniel or a squished-in-the-road spaniel. Time will tell whether it makes any difference.