Portland Agility Club AKC Agility Trial September 2011 - Sunday

Today started way too early. Sometimes I have to wonder why I do this to myself. But then I get to the show site and get to run my girl and, well, it all makes sense. Seriously running on empty here and have a new employee starting tomorrow so going to make this recap short and sweet.

We weren't entered in Fast today and we were running tall to small. Standard was up first - a nice course that looked doable and fun.

Sadly it sort of fell apart from the get-go. We knocked the bar on the second jump right off the bat. It was nice and cool this morning and Vegas was feeling pretty frisky when we went in the ring so my thought was she landed long from the tire and just didn't collect for the jump. Knocking bars is pretty unusual for her unless I do something to get in her way. This afternoon Craig and I spoke and he wasn't watching closely but actually had felt she didn't have the speed she needed to clear the bar. That puzzled me as it was the opposite of what I'd thought. The video is fairly telling, though, at least to me. I think the reason was the former. If you watch you'll see her running versus striding. She was moving out and just didn't give herself the time to stride and collect. Feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong...I really need to learn to read these things better. I may re-process the video tomorrow at a slow speed on that section to see even better.

The other thing that happened was that I front crossed after the weaves. It was one of those moments where your body does something and your mind screams, "What the heck?!" It was too late to stop myself and by then I wasn't handling and following through like I should. So naturally she did what was expected. Major bummer with our fumbles because her time was decent. SCT was 63 and she ran it in 54.39. If we hadn't fumbled she probably would have been a second or two faster, at least. Oh well. No harm, no foul. We had a nice little run (of Qs) going until then.

We had a bit of a wait until JWW since they had to run all the Novice and Open Fast and JWW classes first in that ring. We visited, chilled out, walked outside, got rained on a bit, and watched the other Danes running (Soooooo glad to have Lindsay, Heffner, and Bess running local trials again!). The course looked fun - challenging, but fun. There were some opportunities for mistake but in all honesty some of the spots that could be for the Excellent course were worse for the Open dogs.

There was a bit of drama for the 24" dogs though. The SCT written up on the check-in board said 38 seconds. Even the very fast dogs were like, yeah, not much chance there. Thank you, Craig!, for chatting with the judge. Yep, some mistakes had happened including getting the wrong yardage written down thus the calculation wrong. Oops! Thankfully they fixed it; SCT was 46 seconds for 164 yards.

Things went quite well. I did feel like I was struggling to get her to move out and pick up the pace but when I watched the video she was mostly steady. Maybe we just need a slightly faster steady. Haha. I almost lost her at the tunnel after #15 because I thought I had her and took my eye off her. Fortunately we saved it. Our time was 44.03. One JWW Q today and 1 more point.

We stuck around to watch Lindsay's last run with Bess in Open Standard then loaded up, got our final scores and ribbons, and headed for home a little after 4. I unloaded what I had to and ended up napping on the couch with Vegas for about two hours. She put herself right to bed after dinner and is still peacefully snoring. Sweet girl. God I'm so lucky.