Doncaster

This show should be good; it’s well organised, gorgeous venue, good competitors, but it just never seems to work out for us. We really should have won our division with the girls’ team, we ran a stupidly fast 20.03 first thing, but we went to 5 legs and lost everything for the rest of the day. Dylan’s team did really well but lost the crucial first race which turned out to be the real clincher for the day, and came 3rd.

Kim ran well but not great, she’s still not fit enough and I’m beginning to worry that I’m not going to be able to get her back to peak fitness. She’s 9 years old and she’s had 3 months off to injury this year. Since her body is slowing down anyway, it makes it really hard to condition her and get her back to the fitness she needs for flyball. She isn’t firing off the box as well as she used to and it means she is occasionally double striding the first hurdle back (although I know that she does this when she’s not racing, so if we’re against an NFC or noticably slower team, she will ease up. Cheeky).

Dylan really did run well, he tried really hard but we had a few problems. Our boxloader was a stranger to Dylan, and Dyl’s box suffered as a result. That’s disappointing but not wholly unexpected. Dyl has always turned better when he has a noisy, familiar person loading, like Katie. On the plus side, he wasn’t half as wide as he has been recently. They were just way too low on the box, he needs to come in higher and that will help him push back.

I’m also really struggling with both dogs’ starting points, for different reasons. Kim is much slower than she was 6months ago, but I’m still trying to run her from 35ft. This clearly is not working. I got loads of lights all day on my changeovers because I’m having to let Kim go as the other dog is just rising for the first jump back, if not earlier. This is too early to judge the speed of the dog coming back. If all the dogs on the team were running consistent times throughout the day, it wouldn’t be a problem, but they’re not (and neither is Kim, I’m really not blaming anyone else). I’m going to take her back to 30ft-ish at training and try and work out a new start point for her.

I’m kind of having the same but different problem with Dylan. I’ve moved him back to 38ft as he’s got faster, but I know I haven’t got his start point right as he’s throwing in an extra short stride to the first jump. I want full speed fluid strides into the first hurdle. I tried to move him to a point where he’s comfortable extending to the first jump but he doesn’t adjust until the 2nd or 3rd attempt, by which point we’ve usually lost the race.

The final problem, which applies to both dogs, is that neither of them (Kim especially) but 100% in at training. If they aren’t racing a dog in another lane, they ease off. Just got to do more work, but it’s so frustrating for me. I’ve always found changeovers fairly easy, but I’m getting loads of lights at the moment. I know almost as soon as I let the Kim go that I’m early or late, but with Dylan I’m never sure what he’s going to do.

Hopefully I can sort this for Bakewell this weekend. Dylan is running with the big boys and girls again in Barneys, for various reasons, and the girls are back with their old partners in crime Bailey and Stripe, so that will make it easier.

That’s my list of personal complaints done. It boils down to More Training Required, as usual.