Flyball Training, a blog post too late!

The blog post isn’t really too late, but I just forgot to post it yesterday!

The girls ran well at flyball, although they were both very tired girlies when we got home. Mollie must have a secret drug store somewhere, she’s been off her head with loopyness this week and it showed at training. She did double the amount of runs compared to everyone else! Thankfully everybody is very understanding and she gets on well with all the dogs so they don’t bother about her occasional interferences.

Kim’s team at Middlesbrough (our next tournament) is a 4 dog team, which I’m always thrilled about because it means more points for my little girl! Our normal height dog has pulled out however and so the team is running 13″ all day, with Kim stepping in as height dog. She ran for a whole season as height dog in 2004, in a 4-dog team, and we clocked some decent sub-20 times, but it’s been a while since she’s done it and she does find it harder now. Jet and Lolly, our super-subs for the day, both normally run over 13/14″ so they shouldn’t have a problem, so it’s only Buffy and Kim, (the two older ladies of the team) who will need to step up the game.

Normally we’d have Mollie as well, but Night Owlers need a reliable 5th dog for backup, and we try and avoid running Mollie over jumps higher than 12″ all day. She can do a couple of races over 13/14″ but it’s a bit too much for her little legs. Out of curiosity last night we measured her legs, her elbow to stopper-pad and height compared to Kim, which was interesting!
Kim: Height: 16.75″, Leg: 10.50″, E-S: 7″ (Weight: 13.21kg)
Mollie: Height: 17.75″, Leg: 11″, E-S: 7″ (Weight: 19.02kg)
So Mollie truly does have stumpy little legs in comparison to her body, as Kim isn’t particularly long-legged. We also measured Dylan in the interests of equality, and he is 22.50″ tall (and weighs around 22.30kg, although the girls’ weights mentioned here are from January and Dylan’s is from last June).

Dylan was running with 3/5 of his Little Owler starter team, and is still being both frustrating and brilliant on the box. Again he was doing a wonderful swimmer’s turn 80% of the time, and then throwing in something terrible and different the other 20%. We’ll try him at Middlesbrough with the cone in and if he starts messing about we’ll just roll the ball down the box, it’s quicker and less harmful. It looks as though Dylan will be running lead dog (just like his dad!) anyway, so at least I don’t have to worry about changeovers.