Drax May Bank Holiday #1

We did not have a very successful day at Drax. Mollie’s team chose to go NFC rather than withdraw after super height dog Bails got injured this week. Unfortunately this is a problem with a team consisting primarily of Veteran dogs; if any one of them gets injured, then the whole team struggles. Obviously with a height dog missing it’s even worse! The team did really well anyway, all the dogs looked great and Diva stepped up to run in her first Open setting.

Dylan’s team … the less said about the morning racing the better. We weren’t sure what lineup was going to work best as some dogs either hadn’t been at training or hadn’t been running well at training, so we chose to go with a lineup that (with hindsight) probably wasn’t that great. Dylan was running anchor but by the time I actually let him go we had 1/2 lights already, so with 5 dogs running I think our fastest time was 26s. Disaster. Dylan sat out the next race (against an empty lane) so Bertie could run, and even then the team only clocked 23.03s.

We ran a little better in the afternoon, with a 21.18, but I was still quite disappointed. I thought Dylan ran well but 14″ is too much for this four-dog team as a whole, and with some of the dogs lacking fitness and both Chip and Dylan having issues running into/out to Biba, we need a lot more training.

The top team ran better, back into the 18s where they should be, but they were bottom seed so were always going to struggle. Fingers crossed for some better results at Swallownest.

Rio was really crazy excited about meeting and greeting. She had to sit in the car for an hour whilst I ringpartied first thing, and I don’t think that helped her out. Having said that, she was really polite with all the other dogs, did everything asked of her, including holding her wait, and spent her time in the exercise area sniffing and trotting around rather than running mad laps. We also spent some time playing the Look at That game as she showed some interest in watching the dogs flyball, possibly because this was the first outdoor tournament we’ve been to. She was very good! Not tired at all today though. There isn’t much of an exercise area at Drax so no where for her to really run or play.