Thursday Night Leage - Week 4

Last night's league combined week 4 and half of week 5 since we run on Thursday night and next week is Thanksgiving. It had the potential to run kind of late since two runs for as many people as we have usually takes 2 hours on the dot. However, what a great group that pitched in and just worked hard because we were on the road home after 3 runs in just under 2.5 hours.

Without further ado, here is how the night panned out:

The first run was Faux Wildcard. Essentially this was a standard course with three 'wildcard' bonuses. If you successful completed 1 bonus, you earned 10 points, 2 bonuses = 20 points, and all 3 bonuses = 40 points. I'm excited to say Vegas got all three bonuses. However, with all good things, often come some bad. Such as the case with agility some days. For some reason she has started shutting down on me if it's something she doesn't like or she doesn't do well and I have to take her back. She did that here and it was a bit of a struggle to get her through 6 short weaves - of which she is more than capable. I'm most proud of how she accomplished the other two bonuses though. They're designated as 9a/9b and 13a/13b. The 'b' obstacles were the bonus. If you take a look at the angles she had to go from one obstacle to the next, she did really well. We got a lot of kudos for her ability to handle 13b to 14.

Our second and third runs were standard, both good courses. On all of them I really tried to work her start line stays but she had other ideas. She did good for a few seconds but not until I got to where I wanted to be. I guess that will remain ongoing. She had about 4 seconds on the table and then jumped off...so we had to go back and sit and I got frustrated with her. We then made it through everything up to the weaves and that took about 5 tries. It's hard to tell on the picture, but it's not as straight of an entry as it looks. After the weaves she did finish well, although I had to enforce contact behavior at the end of the dog walk. I basically have given up the competition part of league and am using it to enforce training as she doesn't get much sequence practice otherwise.

Last we ran the week 5 standard course. This way we can miss league for Thanksgiving and come back the following week, run that week's runs plus the extra from week 5 and we'll still be on track. After allowing myself to get pretty frazzed after two completely botched runs, I decided I owed Vegas an apology and we spent some time outside playing and just petting her. We came back in and I just decided to play with her. This run went marginally better. The struggle again was the weaves. She just didn't want to do them. I finally let her just go on without doing the weaves. Everything else was clean and I was a proud mama at the end, especially with the pinwheel and 180 between 15 & 16. She did great and never took the 'off jump' you see near the dog walk and #15.

After we ran, they needed someone to scribe so I took that over. Vegas had other ideas as she felt I wasn't paying enough attention to her and everyone got some laughs out of the goofy girl crawling in my lap and me trying to see over her to the 'judge' while I was scribing.

All in all, I'm grateful my girl never gets mad at me and loves me no matter what. After realizing how frustrated I got with her on run 1 and 2 last night, I have realized I need to focus more on having fun with her and just work our trouble areas more so they are rock solid. Our foundation isn't rock solid yet so we have work to do, but I want her to know I love working with her and that matters more than anything.