2010 Review: Kim

My one, lonely, goal for 2010:

• Kim to get her 20,000pts (Ice Blue Moon Award) in BFA Flyball

I was perfectly aware that wouldn’t happen! We’re making good progress though, Kim has got her FD-Gold this year (15,000pts) and is currently just under 16,000pts, with the points updates only just having reached the Champs in August. I think she’ll probably level off somewhere around 17,000 for 2010, which means we should reach her FD-Blue sometime next year.

Kim and I have had kind of a strange, backward, wonderful year. I took a few new approaches to her agility, mainly throwing out her startline wait, and she fell back in love with the idea of agility and running like a crazy dog again. She won a Grade 5 Jumping class in July, and then in August won another two jumping classes and two agility classes as well, which threw us straight into Grade 6, just where I didn’t want to be! So of course, at her first Grade 6 show, she promptly won her first agility class and got her first win towards Grade 7. She also picked up around 200 AW points this year, which is somewhat surprising!

She’s very much semi-retired from agility, and only gets to run when everything meets my specifications of “nice Kim classes”, which involves a pre-entry check of good venue with good footing, good classes (no C6-7s thanks!), and then an on-the-day check of suitable weather conditions and smooth, flowing courses which will not nag or make her sad. It works for us, and I am so thankful for every single run we do.

Contrary to the normal passage of time, Kim (and Mollie) has gotten faster with age in flyball. Kim was running steady 4.8-5s times over the summer over 9″, and is currently cruising at around 5s over 12″. She has run in every team, in every position, with every old and new dog we have. She doesn’t care, she just wants to flyball.

Her heart murmur has faded, and this year (touching wood for the final few days), she has had no injuries or incidents. Kim is fit, healthy, noisy, wicked, and still dictating terms to everyone. I couldn’t ask for more!

I know some people think goal setting is something unfair on a dog, but I like to have a goal. I like to sit with Kim and say here is this thing, that doesn’t mean anything to you and doesn’t really mean anything much to me either, but it’s a measure of time and patience and love, which should mean something.

Rolling on, for 2011, just one goal.

• Kim to get her 20,000pts (Ice Blue Moon Award) in BFA Flyball