High Peak (Bye Grade 3!)

A long, long time ago, Kim got her first ever placing at High Peak (a 9th, in Elementary Jumping, when the jump heights were 30″ and she was still a big dog). So there has always been a big star next to the name in the show diary, but for various reasons we’ve never made it back. Doesn’t that sound like a twist of fate?

Kim was happy, lazy and slow in all her classes, but still managed to come 1st in Grade 5 Jumping. My old lady dog is still kickass.

Dylan’s Grade 3 Agility was a hard course. I didn’t think I had a chance. Tight spacings, contact call-offs, pull throughs, arg. Combined 1-3 Agility was running at exactly the same time, and I really wanted the lovely, open course as a warm up first of all, but no such luck — everyone else had the same idea and the queue was non-existant for the G3. So we ran that first, and faulted on the third obstacle, the nice easy bit, by popping the last two poles on the weaves. Did the difficult bit perfectly, of course.

Combined 1-3 Agility was a super easy, blastaway course, with only two minor problems. First three obstacles were jump-weave-aframe, which is a notorious pull for non-weavers. Dylan is normally a solid weaver, but this has caught him before and considering his performance in the previous class, I was mildly concerned! Second problem was the final straight of five jumps in a row, all at different spacings. I saw lots of dogs try to bounce certain sections and none of them pulled it off. I also saw a lot of dogs being forced to shorten their strides because of said distances, so I wasn’t all that hopeful for Dyl getting through.

Anyway, he had a good but (if I’m honest!) not extraordinary run, fast contacts and weaves, beautiful sliding seesaw, but not fully extended on the final run. I went to check his time anyway. I never do this, so was kicking myself for going, but he had gone into the lead so it was just a case of chewing fingernails and waiting.

In the meantime, we ran the Graded 3-5 Jumping, which was a really flowing course, Dylan did his best run of the day and was just a little wide on the pull-thru, but still a good run.

In the end, we finished 1st in the Combined 1-3 Agility, which puts us in Grade 4 for August, and 2nd in the Grade 3 Jumping.

It still hasn’t sunk in yet. We have been working towards Grade 4 for two years and although I wanted the win, I wasn’t 100% confident that we would ever get it. I certainly didn’t think we’d get it on an out-and-out speed course. So, still floating around, shellshocked. We’re off to EMDAC this week for the Midsummer Madness show, which will be a good opportunity to bring me back to down to earth in Novice, but also good practise for all the Grade 4/5 classes we have at Scunthorpe. I can’t believe I get to say that!