Osmaston Flyball

I’m not sure how to blog about this tournament – I have lots of fragmented memories and no clear thoughts! I didn’t wear shoes all weekend, it was really hot, my dogs were great. That’s about all I can coherantly put together.

Mollie ran well, but we tried to keep her doing as little as possible. It was too hot and she’s too crazy. Luckily we had 6 dogs on Saturday and so could replace her as soon as she started to flag. We also kept her from running as stand-by lead dog by letting Kim do it. Kim takes her role as lead dog extremely seriously, but we were pretty awesome. I think Kim would have been a great lead dog in her day, but she’s always been a height dog and it would simply have been too tiring. Now she’s not always the height dog, but she’s 10, and so it’s still not an option apart from these odd occasions when she can be the sub-sub-lead. The team finished 3rd and ran 21.54s.

Dylan ran in a four dog team over 14″. I hate that we did this, if I’m honest. We had no idea that it was going to be so hot even a few days ago, and we didn’t expect to be as short on dogs as we ended up being. But we were very very lucky, in that it was slightly cooler today, we had a lot of 3-leg races, and the dogs are all experienced so we could skip the full warm-ups etc that we normally do. I am grateful that (as a team) we were prepared to forfeit the races had any of the dogs shown any signs of overheating, but I wish we hadn’t had to put them in a position where that was possible to begin with. We won the division and I think the fastest time was 19.38 (we desperately need a height dog!).

Remember: Thatched cottages and silvered church. Running barefoot, hard ground, cropped grass. Sun on shoulders, faces and between toes. Sharing the pool with Dyl. Sitting and filming the changes for Flyers. Minding the stall. Walking round the duck pond, pub.