Lune Valley Sept 2012

I love this show, I love being back indoors. I love Myerscough, it’s such a light and airy arena. Why can’t we have indoor shows all year round?! Dylan also loves Myerscough, I have no idea why because on paper it’s his worst nightmare, but he is always really enthusiastic and runs well there.

Tightly spaced is probably an understatement for our first course, but in the judge’s defense I suppose indoor rings are usually tiny, and he maybe wasn’t prepared for the lovely expansive rings Lune had set up. I want to criticize him for having everything on absolute minimum bounce spacings (as in, the dog had to bounce, there was no other option) but it was a nice course, challenging and interesting! It was never going to be Dylan’s kind of course, but he was additionally super keen to get going and kept accelerating everytime he thought he could. Which, sometimes, he couldn’t. He popped the first set of six weaves because I got in way too close in an effort to push him out for the next obstacle, but then he also popped the second set of 6. Dylan very very rarely pops six weaves, he loves weaving! So I took him back for another go, and another, because he kept popping. Pop pop pop.

We left the ring then, I figured we’d wasted enough of the poor judge’s time making his course look like a shambles. We did it enthusiastically, just running for the line and taking whatever was in the way, so Dylan stayed happy.

G5-7 Agility was much more our kind of course, biiiiig open spaces and lots of nice push outs. The only thing that worried me was that there was a tunnel under the Aframe, with a turn direct onto the Aframe afterwards. I would never ask Dylan to do this in training, it’s much too tight a turn for him to negotiate safely. I had a rough plan for taking him wide which didn’t work, we just got stuck in a tunnel spin cycle. Oops! I should have done what I originally planned, which was to add a jump in after the tunnel and then ask him to Aframe, which is what I ended up doing in the end. No weave popping in this one, but it was an easy entry and spacious set up. Really happy with Dylan’s contacts, all very confident and reasonably fast for him.

I loved all the courses in Ring 1; I think the judge was Zoe Turbefield? I’ve never run her courses before but they were great, pitched perfectly and looked really nice to run. The G6-7 Agility was no different, we had a silly mistake at the start when Dylan flicked away from me. We recovered but I sort of took my foot off the gas then, wanted to make sure we nailed the weaves and sod the rest. We got E’d at the very end, I wasn’t where I wanted to be for the push-out and Dylan added in an extra jump. No worries!

Final run was a nice jumping 5-7 Jumping, Dylan skipped the weave entry and then we needed two more attempts to nail it. It was a 90* entry, not something I’d ever consider difficult for Dyl and not normally anything he’d miss. Bemusing.

So, four Es, oh well! Not sure what’s going on with the weaves, that is sort of worrying. Weaves are usually one of Dylan’s strong points, and we train them regularly without a problem. Maybe he has a new and different kind of injury lurking, one that doesn’t affect his jumping, but does affect his weaves. We’ll see.

Debating now whether to go back to Myerscough for Wilmslow in November, or to head up to Hare’n’Hounds at Richmond at the end of the month instead. Can’t afford to do both!