All Agilitied Out

Certainly a very successful weekend for the Brightness, she ended up going 7 for 8. The NQ was pretty silly, on a straight-line go-on she suddenly veers into me and spontaneously threadles instead of taking the jump in front of her. Can’t complain though, she did fabulous and had a great time, she just loves trialing these days. Even with children around! Double Q #18 today, she’s getting closer. Her weakness is her dogwalk, but that’s not unexpected. We will work on it, but it will never be solid, stopped or running. What they learn first, they learn best, and she learned to do the dogwalk without criteria – and that is what she has.

Now, Navarre’s dogwalk looked fabulous! We really haven’t played around much with exits in trials, I’ve stuck mostly to the plan of letting him run if it’s a straight exit, stopping him with a turn. There were some turns I let him run this weekend and he nailed them all – superstar! He also went 4 for 4 in the weave department today. May have helped that in two of those the course went ‘jump-weave’, so not much speed and momentum at that point. He was trying really hard, someday weaves will be second nature to him – but that day is not now. He’s still figuring this agility thing out, but having a lot of fun in the process. More confident these days, but still asking a lot of questions. He ended up going 2 out of 4 today, and 4 out of 8 for the weekend – and lots of good stuff. We had a ton of fun together and every run teaches me something new.

Courses were really fun this weekend, every one of them had something that I wanted to try and they all flowed really nicely if handled well. But even with having a great weekend and fun courses with a nice 1-judge schedule – three days of agility is too much, we’re staying home tomorrow. I very much enjoyed all my runs today, but I’m ‘full’, we’re ready for a break, stay at home, put up the tree, avoid the traffic and finally give Haku something more interesting to do.

Oh, I did find something that Navarre missed when socializing as a puppy – big bushy hippy beards. He’s seen hipster beards, but the crazy voluminous white beards of the old Eugene hippy guys freaked Navarre out. Lots of public at this trial, and one very nice guy came over to say hello to Navarre and he flipped his shit. And, of course, right as we’re going into the ring, so he was sure those beards were coming to get him – that run did not go super well. Who knew?

As for future agility plans, that’s still up in the air at the moment. Right now I’m all agilitied out, but there is the New Years trial, which for some reason I think WON’T be super cold because it’s mostly in DECEMBER as opposed to January. You know, by one day. I’m not sure though, and the UKI trial in January could be fun, but a break is good too. Hmmm …