Monthly Archives: July 2011

Hayfield Lakes

  By Leanne | July 18, 2011 - 5:45 pm | Dylan, Flyball, Kim, Mollie
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Good weekend, close racing and Notts were excellent hosts. Shame the venue wasn’t as wonderful as everyone else seemed to think (we camp in a tent, flat clean ground is important).

Dylan’s team broke their seed time and won their division, which was great. We also managed to get splits on the dogs for all their races, which was useful for a variety of reasons but from my point of view, confirmed what I already knew about Dyl. He sat out the first race, and then in the second 2 races in the morning session he was running into the same dog (Roi). He clocked consistent 4.8s for those races. In the afternoon Roi was dropped and he had to change into Norah, and his times dropped immediately, and then got worse when he switched back to running into Roi in the second afternoon race (I think his times dropped off to 5.3s at that point, and he normally runs better in the afternoon). He has to change into the same dog otherwise he begins to stutter into the first jump (which is also awful for changeovers).

So, I’m not sure if Dylan will continue running with this team, and if he does, we will have to change the lineup which is not the best option a month before the National Championships. This is slightly frustrating as there’s very little I feel we can do at training; Dyl isn’t comfortable with these dogs away from flyball, it’s not something that will be overcome by practise (although that will help). I feel bad for our team as well, as we’re the weak link.

The girls were in two mixed teams as we’d lost height dog Bailey to injury. We bumped Mollie up a team so she could run 9″ (12″ is too much for her all day), and Kim took up height dog duties in the bottom team, with usual second-team dogs Chip and Buddy to bring a little more speed.

That all fell apart slightly anyway when Mol’s team lost a dog through injury, leaving a 4-dog team! They finished 5th in Div 5, but ran 21s which really wasn’t bad considering we had 12-yr old Mollie, blonde Beardie Biba who is really only in her first season, and 10-yr old Beardie Buffy who hasn’t trained for 9months! Poor Ronnie was the only one left of the original team.

Kim’s team won their division but didn’t run great times, we weren’t exactly on top form but we got lucky on a few legs and pulled a few nose-in-front legs out of the bag.

Champs prep at Nantwich next time, another new venue for us. We’ll be giving our Champs lineups an outing (barring disasters) although I don’t think we know what they will be yet!

Otley

  By Leanne | July 13, 2011 - 9:18 pm | Agility, Dylan
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Running behind on this one. I’m always in two minds about this show, the show organisers are great and they always schedule good classes, but the venue is one of the worst I’ve been to. It’s really uneven and hilly, and if it rains (and of course, it rained) it gets very muddy and awful.

Nice courses all weekend, except the C3-5 Agility on Sunday which was really difficult (less than 20 clears out of 200 dogs?!). Our first run was in the G4-5 Ag which was a super course, interesting push-out start and it flowed really well. Dyl had what I thought was a steady clear; we were very wide on the turn after the aframe and had a slight dither on the end because I’m an idiot. We came 2nd anyway, just behind Nigel Staines. And that was our only clear of the day!

We got E’d in the C3-5 when Dyl went back up the Aframe, which I kind of expected as I only got chance to walk the course once and couldn’t figure out how to do that bit anyway. We did the rest of the course well though, including the awkward turn off the dogwalk and the pull-thru at the end. We struggled with the same sequence at Easter, visible improvement!

G4-5 Jumping was a nice open course but we rushed onto the line and Dylan wasn’t focussed at all. He popped out of the weaves (second obstacle) and I took him back to restart and we did finished up well, although Dylan did the pipe tunnel a few more times than he technically should have.

We only got one run in on Saturday when it wasn’t raining. The G4-5 Jumping was a really fun run, we had a pole down (yeah, sharp turn going downhill, we weren’t the only ones with that pole off) so I decided to run the end in the risky way, which didn’t work. More extraneous tunnels!

And then it rained. Torrentially. I was queuing after they’d called to the end of the class in the Adams Derby when the clouds opened. Dylan hated me for that run but we went clear and came 12th. One day I will post the video of the run in the rain and you can all be appalled at how awful I am to run my dog in such terrible conditions. We then ran back to the car and waited for 40minutes for the rain to ease up so we could run G4-5 Agility, which I was looking forward to as it was just our kind of course. We ended up having to run it in the drizzle and I was too much of a wuss to run properly with Dyl, so we got a refusal. Oops! We finished 3rd anyway with 5R. There were a lot of 5f runs in the end, probably down to the weather.

A bit of a hit-and-miss weekend!

Training x2

  By Leanne | July 6, 2011 - 10:24 pm | Agility, Dylan, Flyball, Kim, Mollie
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Agility = good! Dyl’s seesaw is looking great after our confidence building sessions. I’ve lost the stop on the end but I don’t really care, Dylan isn’t brave enough to fly it and it’s faster. If we need it back later we can work on it, I’m sure. I also worked on 180 pull-thrus, because I hate training them.

I’ve also realised I have a tendency to choose exercises where the dog is on my right. I’m right handed so that’s not really a surprise, but I should try and plan exercises and courses for the left as it’s becoming a weakness.

Flyball = good! The girls were both a bit bonkers; Mollie did a few re-runs that she shouldn’t and Kim has apparently decided she should always run lead, as every time I turned around she’d lined herself up at 25ft, very pointedly ignoring the dogs behind her. Dyl actually looked good over 14″, he did run lead and his striding was excellent. We put a regulator in approaching the box to make him extend into his turn which worked really well, I’ve got to get back to doing that more regularly.

Osmaston Flyball

  By Leanne | July 3, 2011 - 8:38 pm | Dylan, Flyball, Jet, Kim, Mollie
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I’m not sure how to blog about this tournament – I have lots of fragmented memories and no clear thoughts! I didn’t wear shoes all weekend, it was really hot, my dogs were great. That’s about all I can coherantly put together.

Mollie ran well, but we tried to keep her doing as little as possible. It was too hot and she’s too crazy. Luckily we had 6 dogs on Saturday and so could replace her as soon as she started to flag. We also kept her from running as stand-by lead dog by letting Kim do it. Kim takes her role as lead dog extremely seriously, but we were pretty awesome. I think Kim would have been a great lead dog in her day, but she’s always been a height dog and it would simply have been too tiring. Now she’s not always the height dog, but she’s 10, and so it’s still not an option apart from these odd occasions when she can be the sub-sub-lead. The team finished 3rd and ran 21.54s.

Dylan ran in a four dog team over 14″. I hate that we did this, if I’m honest. We had no idea that it was going to be so hot even a few days ago, and we didn’t expect to be as short on dogs as we ended up being. But we were very very lucky, in that it was slightly cooler today, we had a lot of 3-leg races, and the dogs are all experienced so we could skip the full warm-ups etc that we normally do. I am grateful that (as a team) we were prepared to forfeit the races had any of the dogs shown any signs of overheating, but I wish we hadn’t had to put them in a position where that was possible to begin with. We won the division and I think the fastest time was 19.38 (we desperately need a height dog!).

Remember: Thatched cottages and silvered church. Running barefoot, hard ground, cropped grass. Sun on shoulders, faces and between toes. Sharing the pool with Dyl. Sitting and filming the changes for Flyers. Minding the stall. Walking round the duck pond, pub.