BRDTC March 2010 Agility Trial
Riot was out in the agility ring for just the second time this weekend and he did a really good job. He’s still a baby dog, but his focus and determination in the ring is incredible. I absolutely love running this dog. He is just so much fun.
Friday
We started with Open Standard on Friday and had a really nice run. I babysat the tunnel to the weaves too much and tried to get his attention before the weaves that I think I made the situation worse. I also pulled him off the jump after the chute. But overall it was a really good run.
Our late afternoon run was Open JWW. Over all it was a really nice run. I need to work on our turns to make them tighter. We also missed our weave entrance again. We’ve spent so long working weave entrances, but not that much time working them as parts of sequences at speed. We also haven’t done that many courses and I think he does start to get tired part of the way through.
Saturday
JWW was first. It was a really nice course. I sat Riot at the start line and walked out past jump 3. He took off and seeing the drive and determination in his face was a beautiful site. After jump 5 I did a front cross and before I had completely turned around to move forward, Riot had taken jump 6, skipped 7 and was halfway over 8 (which got a collective sigh from the gallery). I called him back, and continued on from the missed 7 for a beautiful remainder of the run — including nailing our entrance to the weaves! A couple people who missed the run asked how it had gone. When I told them about getting behind on the front, they looked at me and said why are you front crossing that dog?
Open Standard was Saturday afternoon. I was really worried about the opening since it was tire to a dog walk/tunnel discrimination and we’ve had a lot of problems with this in class. Fortunately the tunnel opening was about 3 feet away from the dog walk so I made sure my lead out had a lot of lateral distance and we had a successful opening. We again had issues with the weaves entrance, but other than that it was a decent run and our first Open Std Q!
Sunday
There were no Qs on Sunday, but two really great runs. In Standard, Riot had one refusal getting on the table. Not really sure what happened there. And we had weave entrance issues again and for the first time did not complete our weave poles properly. Other than that, a great run.
In JWW, I made two handling mistakes. First I did not make sure I had his head when he came out of the tunnel (obstacle number 1) and second, I was a little paranoid about him taking the wrong end of the tunnel and over compensated when I think if I had just told him tunnel, he would have gone, but I confused him. We did get our weave entrance and the last half of the course was beautiful.
Overall this weekend was a great success! This is only his second time out, only his second new environment (he did seem to be more interested in this floor than the floor in Cleveland). And this is a really chaotic trial — it’s crowded and the crating is practically on top of the ring.
