This is such a long drive. Thankfully it’s worth it, because I love the proper Northern shows. Everyone is so friendly!

I had a borrowed dog for this show in Katie’s Jet. Jet is a complete maniac and I haven’t run her competitively since her first KC show at South Durham, since when she’s become 100x more crazy fast. I said back then that running 2 dogs was hard, but it’s actually been a real struggle for me just to run one dog in the past couple of months. The wait between runs just drags on and on!

The Graded 3-4 Agility was an … interesting course? I really liked it, but I might have been a bit more hesitant if I’d been running a genuine baby dog G3 in there.

Jet set off like a rocket, and did one of the best dogwalks I’ve ever seen her do. Katie will be very proud to know that all the training paid off! She ran right to the end, no creeping, but unfortunately I was so overwhelmed by this I was thinking about the wonderful dogwalk and not where we were going. So Jet didn’t turn for the jumps, and turned for the Aframe. Oops! We carried on and did the Aframe again properly, and then again at the end. You can never have too many Aframes, apparently!

Dylan did some lovely lovely contacts in this run, and I couldn’t have asked for more in that respect! He also nailed the turns and generally made it all look pretty easy. Just one thing letting us down, and that was his jumping. More on that at a later date, but suffice to say we came 4th, just less than 2s off the winner. Time that I feel we could easily have made up with fluent jumping! I can’t complain too much though, a 4th is still a 4th and we’re fast approaching his Agility Warrant now so any placing is a bonus.

1-3 Jumping was a bit of a lost cause. I didn’t like the course, too many pinwheels, so I didn’t really walk it properly and then made the same mistake with both dogs, oops! They both popped the last 2 poles on the weaves, and Jet missed the weave entry because I tried to handle her like Dylan … which I already know doesn’t work!

Thankfully I do learn from my mistakes occasionally, and I handled the Graded 3-4 Jumping completely differently for each dog. Made my life more difficult, but I just couldn’t see how I could get Jet around without poles if I handled her like I would have Dyl or Kim. It almost went to plan as well! Jet did a cracking run, but I panicked at the turn from 14-15 and didn’t cue the turn smoothly enough, so Jet slowed right down, and then she jumped completely the wrong way over 16 and we lost loads of time there. I think that was the only real example of miscommunication all day; both my dogs would have read my cues as a rear cross, but Jet isn’t used to running with me (and me with her!) so she didn’t understand what I was signalling.

Dyl’s plan went … to plan, really! Again, just a shame about the jumping. He finished 9th (24.190), and Jet was 13th (24.934). Winning time was 21.215, but second was 23.534, so not a bad finish for either dog.

Huge congratulations to Cat and Gypsy for going Grade 3 – who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?! – and to Tracy and Mac for winning out of Grade 1. Can’t keep the Aussies down … also to Julie and the gang for their lovely pink rosettes, and to Paul and Farley, who has no faith in his dog and didn’t even check to see if he was placed in his last class. (He was, sandwiched between Dyl and Jetly in 11th!)

It’s been a long while since I’ve looked at Dylan’s obstacle times. A whole year, in fact!

As always, brutally honest times taken from the moment of first contact with the obstacle to the moment the front paw(s) hit the ground. Averages in bold, all times taken from competition runs within the last three months only.

Dogwalk: 2.87 [3.39] (2.87, 3.00, 2.60, 2.46, 3.00, 2.96, 3.20)
Aframe: 1.53 [2.36] (1.60, 1.67, 1.60, 1.34mc, 1.46)
Seesaw: 1.73 [1.95] (1.80, 1.91, 1.54, 1.86, 1.53)

Averages from the last time I took them are in square brackets (that’s Jan 09, apart from the Aframe, which is from Sept 08), and the improvement is fairly noticable. The actual improvement though is in the consistency of the times; a year ago we had variations of up to 4s between times. That Aframe in particular is getting nailed, these days, although contact reliability has slipped from 100% to 90%, hence that little “mc” mark. Seesaw times are looking good, could be a little better but nothing I’m overly worried about right now.

That 2.46 in the Dogwalk times is making me very happy. I would estimate that Dyl runs 2.20 in training, and that 2.46 suggest we’re finally, slowly, making the transition to the ring. On the other hand, we still have plenty of 3s runs in there, so we have a lot of work to do yet! The average is better than it was, but still nowhere near where I would like it to be. We need consistent 2.4s to be anywhere like competitive enough for a G3 win.

No 12 weaves times because we haven’t done 12 weaves very often recently! Possibly because indoor shows sometimes can’t peg them, but judges just don’t seem to be including the weaves all that often anyway at the moment.

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The theme at Ruffdogs52Weeks this week was A Colour.

This is not the picture I anticipated. It’s so overexposed, so lopsided, Mol is too far away — I’m not even sure I like it all that much. But it is the Mol. Mol is overexposed, lopsided, and frequently too far away (usually in pursuit of her One True Love, the holy tennis ball, and her flight is heralded by panicked screams of people she is escaping … or in some cases, running towards).

Most importantly, Mollie is Purple. Mollie lives flyball, and when she flyballs, she wears purple.