Jake's Progress

We left home sooo early to arrive in good time for the start of Saturday's show as measuring (for dogs new to Kennel Club competition) was scheduled for the start of the day. The downside of that was we had a long wait until our turn to run, but that gave us plenty of time to scope out the venue, stroll round the five rings, watch friends running their classes, give Jake a romp in the exercise area and eat lunch far too early. Next time we must pack two lunches, one for mid morning and one for actual lunchtime. The show was outside and in spite of the mud-bath feared at the start of the week, we had cold but sunny weather and the ground was good to run on. Our agility teacher was camping so we had a much-needed cuppa in her caravan.

Jake was much more relaxed at this show than he has been in the fun shows in an equestrian centre this winter – being outdoors must seem a much more familiar setting for agility, even with hundreds of people and dogs milling around 5 rings.


We entered three classes:

Graded 1-2 Agility
This was a nice straightforward course and if I’d been a bit quicker with my command sending Jake out to a particular jump and timed my own turn a little better we probably wouldn’t have got 5 faults. The other 5 faults were down to me not timing my weave command right, so he missed the entry – fixed that in the other courses we ran. What was really weird was that Jake (and several other dogs – but not all) were very distracted by smells on the ground and on the equipment. And I’ve never, ever seen him stop for a huge sniff halfway down over the A-frame. I’m used to having to steady him off the A-frame, not coax him down! Had some beasties been scurrying on the equipment? Had some previous dog pee’d? Something on the A-frame smelled wonderful. All in all, 10 faults and an OK time. I was pleased with lots about this run – as usual, the main problem was operator error!


Combined 1-2 Agility
We went straight on to our next run. With hindsight we should have cooled off a bit and warmed up again – Jake’s adrenaline must have been pumping! We didn’t get off to the best of starts - Jake broke his stay and knocked a pole off the second jump (Rod and our teacher reckon he started and then got confused cos he realised I hadn’t yet given him any signals …) – somehow I still managed the much-practised pull-through to jump three. I really blew it further along the course on a three-jump star – I pulled Jake to me instead of sending him out, which he obligingly did, so we were eliminated for taking the jump in the wrong direction. Whoops! All in all, in spite of the start and my fluffed star I was really pleased at how most of this run went. Jake’s speed, contracts, weave entry and focus on me (after the start, ahem) were all really good.


Graded 1-2 Jumping
This class was really late in the day, so late we were losing the will to live - we so nearly left early and missed it. Good job we didn’t, as we came 3rd! The course began with two jumps and a weave, and I decided to start well past the first jump and WALK alongside the 2nd jump, the idea being this would steady Jake towards the weave. It worked! The rest of the course was basically a spiral RUN – much less twisty-turny than I feared. Watching the video I see that towards the end I’ve run out of breath to shout anything but the final “over”. The two fastest dogs were ahead of us by 5 seconds – two fleet-footed (border) collies that barely touched the ground. We would usually go faster than this – Jake is usually ahead of me on this sort of run - but we would never, ever have shaved 5 seconds off our time!

Here's the video evidence.

Labels: Agility, Agility shows