October Rotherdrax Flyball
I am already regretting entering anything over the winter. I always forget about the cold, and the dark, and the cold.
Kim was running with the second team, Hawk, and after a small series of minor disasters our lovely 5-dog team was down to an equally-lovely but slightly unpredictable 4 dog team. Kim and Brooke are both 12″ height dogs, and both can get a little tired running all day, and our lead-lurcher Chip is a lurcher, and he gets a little bored of flyball sometimes. However, with one full height dog gone, everyone was in and we actually had a really great days racing! We finished 1st in Div 6.
Dylan was running with the first team, Barneys, and we had to switch the order around unexpectedly after our first warm-up. Dylan was reassigned on the front, which makes me pull all kind of squirmy faces. I’m not great on the lights, but I’m even worse with Dylan! Dylan has issues approaching the first hurdle, and has started stuttering into the jump quite badly. We worked out his stride pattern and eventually worked out that he must go from 35ft into a dog he trusts, otherwise he stutters. This does not work when we go lead, because Dyl needs to run from 37ft to hit the start at the right time! This completely wrecked his stride and even when we moved back to 35ft in the afternoon he was all over the place.
His box was noticably tighter in the afternoon, he tends to go very wide in the morning (I don’t know why … ) but he’s always run better in the afternoon anyway. So now the most frustrating thing with Dylan is that he’s running at around 5s or just under over 14″ with this stupid stuttering start. Hopefully next time Norah will be back and we won’t have to go lead again! We finished 1st in Div 4 anyway, which was a bit of a happy ending.
Mollie was in the third team, Marsh, and had a great time running lead over 9″ all day. She’s completely mental. We struggled a bit in this division as we were on a declared time, and couldn’t run our fastest four dogs as they would break out! I think the team finished 3rd overall, but it was excellent racing.
Kim got her Gold Award (15,000points). She’s the 431st dog to get this award in the history of the BFA, and the 85th Crossbreed to get it. She actually got the points for it way back in June, but the BFA are so far behind on uploading the points that the awards are just starting to get presented now. Typically, this is the time of year when people don’t want to stay for presentations, and really don’t want presentations to take long when they do stay! It was freezing cold yesterday, but we had a few other dogs getting big awards as well, plus our successful day rosette-wise. Traditionally Owlers give a little bag of goodies to the dogs and handlers getting their big awards, and Kim got a lovely “gold” toy that she promptly ragged in all the dirt, a gold trophy and some very smelly chicken treats. And I got a baby box of Celebrations, so everybody wins!
Actually, the two trophies Kim has from her Silver and now Gold awards are two of my favourite trophies, they get pride of place on the shelf. They represent how brilliant a flyball dog Kim is, even if she isn’t the fastest singles dog; they represent all the cold and the rain and the baking hot days, the grass, turf, mud, rubber matting. The sitting in the rain while the lights go haywire, again. Running in every position into every dog every single time. Never running off whils we set up campsite, mugging people for food, helping put the tents down again. Being incredibly noisy, silly and excited, but still doing every run perfect every time with 100% heart. The 15,000 points doesn’t necessarily mean that, but the trophies from our team do.