Jake's Progress

We only went to the Sunday of the East Lothian show. Any initial smugness about having a lie-in because it's just down the road was forgotten when we pulled onto the city bypass and saw the electronic boards saying ROAD CLOSED FOR REPAIRS... We j-u-s-t managed to get to Tranent before 0815 in time to walk two courses, ugh. (We don't get course plans which I gather are the norm in other parts of the world.) As it was the queues were full of people fretting (or philosophising ) that they hadn't walked the course ... alongside the campers who had terrible hangovers from the Saturday night party in the sports centre hall. 'Tis said that someone we know was trying to climb poles in the marquee at 2am.

Our goals for this show were to try to go clear / place in one class, and (more importantly) to make sure Jake had a calm, non-reactive time around the show and in the queues. Mission accomplished! Maybe in another post I'll write some more about how I've been trying out some of Leslie McDevitt's ideas from Control Unleashed.

Our best run was our first: graded 1-3 jumping class. I was in a good place - keyed up enough to have some adrenaline, but not too much. Jake was focussed and FAST - like he'd been fired out of a rocket. All that practising OUT routines in the park paid off. We came 2nd in the grade 1s, yay! And if I hadn't fluffed my final turn, who knows?



Then we tried our paws at a combined grade 1-4 TF&O class. We were never going to win anything running against grades 2-4, but get us - we managed a whole 9 obstacles before Jake entered the weave on the wrong side, the whistle blew and we had to hare to the finish - better than the last time we ran a TF&O, when we achieved a whole two obstacles before Jake knocked a pole and the whistle blew. I'd have liked to have run the whole course as an agility class, it was fun.

Next up was the Graded 1-3 Agility class - I'd walked the course just once before we had to clear the ring. Still, I'd been watching others, and thought we should be able to do it. Unfortunately for us, the dog immediately before our run was a speedy, vocal border collie, and as as we waited for our turn Jake transformed from chilled-out, focussed pooch into let-me-at-that-agility-course aroo! aroo! hyper-dog . He broke his stay at the start line so there was an undignified scramble to complete the star in the right order, followed a little later by me fluffing a turn just before the see-saw, losing track of Jake, nearly falling over him and in the tangle of legs, stepping on his paw ... Yelp! went Jake. Aww! went the crowd. He was fine and once I'd established that, the judge let us finish - but we were both all over the place by then - muffed turns, Jake running under a jump. Ah well. How were we eliminated? Let me count the ways.

On to the combined grades 1-3 jumping class which I hadn't even walked in advance - I was all set to call off as it was midday and getting really hot. Until I realised our agility teacher was in the ring party, so there were no excuses! I watched several people run from various vantage points and then gave it a whirl. Halfway round Jake spotted Rod filming on the sideline and decided he'd had enough of all this running on a hot day and ran off course to say hello ... I got his attention again and we did some OK turns and a good weave (ignoring the tempting tunnel just in eye-shot) - but I then lost my way in the final box sequence. Fortunately the ice cream van had arrived on site by then so all material concerns were forgotten. Three Mr Whippys, please. Jake? Spoiled?

Labels: Agility shows