The Weekend Report - Not Our Day

Jimmy and I signed up for one day of the Pembroke Welsh Corgi Club of the Potomac's  AKV agility trial with the intention of kicking some bunny butt. Unfortunately, neither Jimmy nor I had our game on yesterday. One word describes our first course of the day: BRUTAL. It was an amazingly difficult Standard run with traps every which way you looked. It was tight as could be, sharp turns abounding. We actually got off to a good start, made it past the dogwalk without Jimmy blowing his contact, made the extremely hard weavepole entrance (a teeter to a sharp left into the weaves, most dogs weren't getting it!), but our old nemesis, the table, reared its ugly head! Yes, Jimmy, that little stinker, refused the table like 5 times before I finally got him on there! He was either getting on that table or he was getting walked off the course in shame. He was NOT going on to the tunnel. It was the next obstacle, he loves tunnels, and I do believe he just plain did not want to wait on the table to have his fun in the tunnel. So he did finally get on, I told him he was a good boy (I lied!), and then he shot into the wrong end of the tunnel. Of course we were disqualified six times over already, so it really didn't matter. The rest went fine, of course. My confidence going into this run was poor, so my mental game failed me, but I truly did not expect a table fault. Sigh.

So, since we are now in search of Double-Q's at every trial now, the day was already a wash.

The club offered the optional class called Time 2 Beat. I had never tried it before as it is new and since it is optional for the clubs, you don't see it at every trial. The idea for this one is speed. All dogs run in just one class, so Novice dogs run against Open or Excellent dogs of their own height. The idea is the first dog to run sets the course time, and everybody else has to beat it. There is only one winner who gets 10 points, and the rest of the pack get points based on how close their time was to the winners. The courses are built to encourage speed, no table, no dogwalk, 12 weaves (tough for the Novice dogs).....So in the 12 inch class Jimmy came in #4. This earned him 8 points and got him his first leg. This title will take awhile, you need 15 legs! and 100 points to get the T2B title after your dogs name.

Finally came our Jumpers run. It wasn't too bad, my nerves were settled since a Double-Q was unfortunately not on the line, but I just didn't have my mojo right. I didn't hear the electronic GO, so I didn't know if I could start. I looked to the judge, she finally nodded, and in the mean time Jimmy broke his stay so my lead-out was gone. This messed up my handling and Jimmy knocked an early jump bar. With us disqualified, I ran all out pushing for speed, egging on faster weave poles, etc. The rest of the run was clean (of course!) and Jimmy finished with a nice speedy time of a hair over 30 seconds. I didn't wait around to see the results and compare his time to other dogs. The building was getting steamy hot ( a real and typical problem for this location), and we hit the road ASAP!

As a side note, there was a good Cardigan showing at this trial. My friend Aggie who I often train with got a Double-Q on her speedy gal Bella. Another girl Cardi with handler David, also got a Double-Q. I saw a beautiful fluffy brindle running. That was the first Brindle fluff I've ever seen. Also a speedy blue merle fluff was there, but I missed the run. And in the 8 inch JWW class, I saw a black-tri girl that made Jimmy look like he was walking the course! Oh my goodness, she was AMAZING! Thank goodness she runs in eight inch. She ran the jumpers course a full 5 seconds faster than Jimmy. A top sheltie would have trouble beating her time!

So there you have it, not our finest hour/day. We will give it another go next weekend!