I said the real test of whether or not the acupuncture was working would be Kim’s attitude and ability this weekend.

It seems pretty clear to me that something we have done for her in the past two weeks has worked. Her final run of the weekend at Waldridge Fell was a good run; smooth, speedy, responsive, with a little bit of my cheeky little Kim thrown in as she couldn’t resist adding a few extra jumps and laughing at me as she did it. It wasn’t just a good run by the injured-dog standard; it was a good run by the fully-fighting-fit-and-working standard.

We obviously have a fair long way to go yet, but she proved to me this weekend that she isn’t ready to go down just yet.

It’s not worth really recapping our runs, but I will anyway! Her first run in Novice Agility was all over the place, huge wide turns and then several dead stops in front of jumps. Novice Jumping was a surprising clear round, but it wouldn’t have been clear if she’d have been going normal speed – it was slooooow and a bit pants, but her jumping looked much better, more comfortable and properly extending. Novice Helter Skelter was not what I was expected; even squinting and from a distance it didn’t meet the Helter Skelter class description. I’ll apologise to the judge now for doing the one thing I really hate watching other competitors doing, which is making up their own course and disregarding the judge’s course! To excuse myself, I’ll blame poor course design and my poor little dog who is still recovering from injury — I couldn’t have asked her to do such a twisty course. Anyway, I did ignore the judge for the first half of the course and ran a very straightforward loop to encourage Kim, which obviously worked somehow as she shot out of the mid-course weaves and suddenly started running like the dog I usually have. She did miss out several jumps but her movement and acceleration really caught me by surprise.

I have to add that the courses at Waldridge Fell were absolutely lovely, and I really enjoyed my first set of 5-7 classes! I was a bit worried that Kim and I would be overfaced, but had she been fully fit I think we’d have comfortably managed the challenges in the courses. Despite getting refusals and being much slower than her normal self, she still managed to get the fastest time of the Grade 5 dogs in the agility (by 4s!), which was rather surprising!

All day at Waldridge she just got more and more confident in her ability to run and jump. We’ll just have to see what happens at Nottingham this weekend now, hopefully there will be further improvements.