The Weekend Report - One of Each But....

This weekend was an agility trial given by the Hyattsville Dog Training Club. I loved how they ran this one ring trial! They ran all the Excellent/Masters level dogs in Jumpers first. They switched to Standard and again ran just the Excellent and Masters level dogs. So if your dogs were all in the upper levels, you didn't have to wait nearly as long as the usual running order of Excellent/Masters, then Open, then Novice, then switch to the other. And if you were a newby, running in Novice, you didn't have to arrive nearly as early. Of course if you had an advanced dog and a Novice dog, your day was going to be long no matter how they ordered things.

Now, on to my report....As the title says, I got one of each. I got a Jumpers Q and I got a Standard Q. Unfortunately, one came on Saturday and one came on Sunday, so it wasn't the needed double-Q. There is happy news in there though. Jimmy's fears ( the noise phobia from several trials back) have eased some more. While he still didn't want to walk into the area around the ring, once there and eating more raw tripe, he calmed quickly. He even felt enough like his old self to sass me into feeding the tripe faster and he barked enthusiastically at the dog running in front of us. Both of those are very good signs indeed!

Saturday was just one bar down in Jumpers. The Standard run was a good speedy effort and we managed to earn the third place ribbon! Yay, Jimmy. We missed second place by a mere 1/2 second.

Here are the maps:

Click to enlarge

Sunday, Jumpers was the one that went well. The bars stayed up and our time was pretty fast so we netted 18 more points. While we weren't in the ribbons, we did a very respectable 7th. Standard was a very unusual course, and quite tricky. There were many places things could go wrong. The first half was definitely easier then the second half, where unfortunately, Jimmy took out a bar as we headed into the home stretch. I have a feeling I did not work the turn well enough to give Jimmy the angle he needed for a clean jump. Big sigh........I wish I had video to see what I did wrong. I haven't been too good about getting my camera out and handed off to someone. With trying to ease Jimmy's fears, I just don't have the focus for that.

Here are the maps:

Click to enlarge

The two qualifying legs from this weekend also finished off our 20 legs needed for the AKC Nationals qualifications. So now, we are down to needing just points....lots of them yet.

So, while this wasn't our best performance, I have to be happy that Jimmy is slowly coming out of his noise phobia funk. And you can't ever complain about finishing in the ribbons! Now, we just need to get our groove back when it comes to our teamwork.

Tracking Jimmy's MACH progress:
Masters JWW legs: 36  Now he's working on his MXJ4!
Masters STD legs: 21 We earned our MX2 and are working on MX3 now.
Double Q's: 14 (out of 20 double-Q's needed for a MACH.... 70 Percent! The snowball is headed downhill!)
MACH Points: 889 (out of 750 speed points needed for a MACH...... We've got our points and then some!)

AKC Nationals 2014:
Double-Q's: 6 (out of 4 needed)
Points: 320 (out of 500 needed)
Masters Legs: 20 (out of 20 needed)


With a full weekend of agility, I am way behind in what's going on on everyone's blogs. Hopefully, I can do some catching up during the week!