The Weekend Report - The Season Opener

Well, our first weekend of agility is behind us. As always, I go into it with high hopes, dreaming of getting more of the needed Double-Q's* for our championship. Things started out well enough with a Q (and even 5th place) in Standard Saturday morning. But, alas, it was not meant to be. We had no more Qs (qualifying runs) the rest of the weekend. Jimmy and I share the blame fairly evenly. He popped a weave pole too soon in Saturday's Jumpers run, a very unusual mistake for him. Then Sunday's Standard run had a tricky ending which I botched magnificently! I planted a late front-cross, lost my balance and sense of where I was and that was that. Jimmy didn't know what I wanted and rightly so. With Jumpers, I came out of the ring thinking we had Q'd because I hadn't seen/heard the bar Jimmy knocked down. I get out of the ring, and my friend who was running the video camera for me (Thanks Chris!) says too bad about the pole and I was like WHAT?!.....Big Sigh.

* For those of you who are not agility folks, Double-Qs (or QQs) are when you qualify (make zero mistakes) in both of your runs (Standard and Jumpers) in the same day. You need to accomplish this 20 times in order to earn your Master Agility Championship. Some people make this requirement look like a breeze. I am not one of those people! You also need to accumulate 750 speed points but fortunately they happen in any run in which you qualify, it doesn't have to be a Double-Q. We are well on our way to having enough of those because Jimmy is a speedy little guy!

So, for your entertainment, here are my runs:

Saturday's  Masters Standard run, clean and speedy, giving us 26 more speed points.....




Saturday's Masters Jumpers with the weave pole pop....(Thanks go to Sandy for videoing this one!)



Sunday's Masters Standard with the clutzy handler at the end....

And finally, Sunday's Masters Jumpers with just one bar down...The end was incredibly fun, tunnel to the chute to another tunnel, super fast!

I have a tendency to get pretty bummed out when we aren't very successful, and that is a flaw in my personality. In truth, I should be very happy (and I am!) that both days Jimmy gave me a beautiful table and both days a lovely dogwalk contact. Those have hurt us in the past and this weekend he was perfect. Also, he had a nice 30 minute professional massage when we were done on Sunday. He was found to be in pretty good shape, just a couple of sore spots that were worked out. His iliopsoas that he pulled last summer seemed to be fine. That is really the best news of the whole weekend!

Tracking Jimmy's MACH progress:
Excellent B JWW legs: 24  Now he's working on his MXJ3!
Excellent B STD legs: 14. We earned our MX and are working on MX2 now.
Double Q's: 8 (out of 20 double-Q's needed for a MACH.... 40 Percent!)
MACH Points: 587 (out of 750 speed points needed for a MACH...... 78 Percent!)

Time 2 Beat legs: 6 (out of 15 needed for his T2B) 48 points (out of 100 needed)