Dog Vegas
Kim first, because she’s special. She was awesome this weekend, she enjoyed every run, even if what she was enjoying was arguing with me. She was silly and noisy and flirted with all the boy dogs, especially Gilbert.
Unfortunately we were just outclassed. We ran some great clears but there were some equally fast, equally good G6 dogs there who just edged out the old lady and I. I sometimes think Kim plans it; she clearly loved running this weekend, was fast and fun and needs just one more win for G7, but failed to get it. She knows I’m on to retiring her when she reaches G7, the sneaky minx.
Dylan was not good. Kind of. His contacts, groundspeed, turns and weaves were great, but his jumping was dreadful. We had early takeoffs, late takeoffs, skipping strides, measuring, every bad trick in the book. Bar three, we also had the easiest 4/5-7 courses I’ve ever run this weekend. It was like being back in Grade 3! So we got a lot of clears and no places, sometimes 5s off the pace of the winners. Very frustrating, worrying and disappointing.
First difficult course was the hardest course I have ever run, first thing on Friday morning. Harder than some of the Champ courses I’ve seen, and it says something that Winnie won the G6 with time faults. Only 2 dogs (both G7’s) got under the course time, and only a handful of dogs got around the course at all.
Second difficult course was the G5-7 Vegas Money class on Sunday. It was a ground-covering course but with some traps and challenges in there as well, and we did an ok clear. And we came 1st. I am thrilled to bits, but I’m also a bit shocked! It was a nice run, nothing special, and it never even crossed my mind that we might have won it. I didn’t even check the results, didn’t go to presentations, nothing. We also picked up £9 as it was the Vegas class, so Dylan officially earnt more than I did in July.
Third difficult course was the hilariously difficult G4-7 Jumping, which we got another E on. Amazingly we did the very tricky section, and then promptly popped out of the 9 weaves (which we had no problem with in the other 400 classes they featured in). Oops! Lots of fun to run though, I’ll try and find a course plan from that one.
Glossing over the amazing win, which throws us into Grade 6 for the winter season (I have no more KC shows before October now!), Dylan’s jumping really was a cause for concern. Huge thanks to Vicki, Suzanne and Julie who were all happy to stand and listen to me worry, and for their various suggestions on the possible cause. Dyl is going to the vet next week for a check over, I want to be sure there is nothing physical causing him to jump weirdly. There are a couple of other things I’m going to check out which could indirectly be causing it as well.