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!)

I was stood in a field at 9:10am this morning, setting up flyball jumps and holding a tape measure on the snow covered ground. The weak winter sun was just coming up over the bare frozen trees, and all the sensible people in England were in bed, warm and snuggley and not losing touch with their extremities.

Here are my reasons.

At 10:30am, I was beginning to think my reasons were bloody stupid.

Some other people turned up too, and some of their reasons looked pretty daft as well.

Still, we didn’t leave until my fingers and toes had actually servered all contact with the rest of me, with my other limbs seriously thinking about going the same way.

I then had 20minutes at home to begin thawing out before I was whisked away to begin re-freezing, whilst doing the results for the annual Holmfirth Harriers Tinker Cup Handicap, which I do every year. I finally got home at 5pm. The dogs have spent the afternoon in their nice, warm, snuggley beds asleep. My jealousy knows no bounds.

I don’t do cold. Please can we have summer back?

More photos on Flickr … http://www.flickr.com/photos/kayanem/

Doncaster hold their winter tournament at the Northern Racing College, and I’ve been to this venue plenty of times, but I’ve never seen any Thoroughbreds until this weekend.

They didn’t seem all that bothered with us, to be honest.

Bit of a disasterous start to the day, when we arrived at 8:15 and found out we were 4 dogs down and so had been forced to scratch a team. Kim, Mollie, Jess and Archie were bumped up to join Jet and George in Div 2, and Dylan’s team was reshuffled from 6 dogs to 5.

Kim and Smoll had a blast in Div 2, especially over Jess’ 9″ height. We took almost everyone to 5 legs, I got a 0.00 on the lights for the first time ever, and everyone got lots of points. A good day, I feel! Especially proud of our 3rd team dogs, we ran a 19.93 with Kim, Mollie, Jess and Jet which isn’t half bad for 2 old ladies, a height dog who hasn’t raced for a couple of months, and Jet (of course, Jet was the fastest, but I don’t think she could have been embarrassed by her team-mates).

Dylan’s team were rubbish, and hopefully they won’t mind me saying that! We tried our best and just failed, but we had a laugh as we always do, and scratched our heads a bit as theoretically we had quite a fast team, not sure why it didn’t work out! Dylan ran really well, he does love running with CrazyBails, and he’s confident with Chip and Stripe. Some lovely turns, some not so good, but it’s something to work on!

We finished off the day by getting incredibly dirty packing everything away, Katie must be our undisputed turf-throwing champion, but maybe we’ll give her a run for her money next time.

Dylan has a super cute quirk of resting his head on things. His head is the perfect height for resting on people’s laps, so he does that all the time, and looks up at you with big sad puppy eyes. This usually means he wants a cuddle. However, he also rests his head on other things, like a chair, or a bag, or a stair, and he doesn’t want anything from it. It’s just that the object is there, and damn, his head is just too heavy for his neck to carry around all the time.

Kim has clearly been observing this behaviour, because she tried it today. She really wanted some cereal, and tried all her other super cute tricks to get some, and eventually rested her tiny little head on my lap with the big pitiful eyes. She’s never ever done this before, but I’m ashamed to say it worked, and she got a few dry cornflakes. It was just too cute, even though I’m fully aware she’s a manipulative little bugger.

She’s also a complete grass. Mollie had somehow found a tennis ball in the kitchen this morning, and we were in the lounge. The dogs were shut in the kitchen to dry off, and Kim just spent the whole time kicking up a fuss. Eventually I got up to see what was wrong, and she ran straight over to Mollie (who was chewing away, blissfully unaware), and gave me a look which quite plainly indicated that this was Breaking The Rules.

Ball confiscated, Kim smug, Mollie sulks. Kim and Mollie do not have a happy and loving relationship; it’s a game of one-upmanship, which I have to say Kim almost always wins. Kim is the beautiful but evil witch queen, who has all sorts of subtle little traps laid, whereas Mollie is a little soldier, with a smile, a sunny disposition, and a killer body slam. It’s constant warfare in our house.

I have to admit though, this is why I like girl dogs better than boy dogs. Dylan is smart, occasionally manipulative or sly, but he doesn’t have the forethought for strategy that the girls do. I love working with that. Plus, y’know, bitches are bitchy and sassy and just generally awesome.

NB: <a href=”http://susangarrettdogagility.com/”>Susan Garrett</a> posted on this topic (boys vs. girls) and it’s generated loads of blog responses on a similar theme. How can I resist jumping on the bandwagon?

Days like this remind me why I do flyball.

I was pretty excited about Dylan’s team anyway, they’re a fab fast bunch of dogs who were on a very comfortable seed time, and both Dylan and Skye love running over 12″. Perfect conditions! Anyway, the last race against Marnicks was down to the wire stuff, they’d run the same times as us during the day (we both ended up with a fastest time of 19.81) and we’d both won the same amount of races, so we were both battling for 2nd place. We had to wait for confirmation from the ring party twice, because it was so tight and we couldn’t call the winners. Last race of the day, when it was dark and the marquee spotlights were lighting up the lanes, and the whole place was screaming the dogs home.

It is such an adrenelin rush. I love agility, and I come away happier from competitions, feeling as though at least one run went well, or we did something good. But I’ve never come out of an agility ring buzzing the way I can at flyball; you don’t have to win, and you don’t even have to be running a dog. Boxloading, scribing, team captain, ring party, spectator … once teams are racing, everyone comes away smiling. Good racing is good racing, and it gets into your bones.

There doesn’t seem to be so much of it around at the moment, everyone is hung up on points or team times or singles times or box work. I’m guilty of it. You forget about just racing, just giving up your heart and soul to win. But we remembered this time, and I was so proud of Dylan this weekend, because he gave everything he had, and he hasn’t done that before. It didn’t matter than his turns were kind of quirky, because he was turning and it was fast, and it didn’t matter that he tried to bite my face off, because he was so hyped and so excited about flyball. (I say it doesn’t matter, but we are going to work on both those things. I need my face and Dyl needs his joints).

Kim and Mollie also had some good racing. Kim’s team Barking Owlers finished 1st and Kim was storming all day. She appreciated her time going lead dog, especially against Mollie, and says thank you to Captain Katie for letting her do it! Mollie was fantastic in the Eagle Owlers, but I didn’t get to see her run a whole lot, because Barking and Eagles were in the same division so it was rather difficult!

To top it off we all got plenty of awards. Dylan and his best redheaded girl Skye got their FDG (3000 points), Chip got his FDI (1000pts) and Stripe got his FDA (5000pts), Moo and Jet got their FD-Silver (10,000pts) and George got his FD-Platinum (25,000pts).

Finally, major props to Rotherham. I know they were worried about making the step from one marquee to two, but they pulled it off perfectly.