No training this week because snow. January. Coldness. Snow. Disappointing.
Trekked all the way across to Myerscough for 2 Jumping classes and an Anysize run for Dylan.
C1-7 Jumping P1 was A+ for good use of space, lots of running with some tight demanding sections, well pitched. 12 weaves, no problem. Ri’s jumping was pretty terrible, lots of early takeoffs, so she had a pole. Lots of wide turns, and then she wrapped the pull-thru like a badass, obviously. She’s not responding terribly well to static front crosses, so we need to work on that. She would have been placed without the pole, which is pleasing.
C1-3 Jumping was much too difficult for the grade. Sort of the opposite of the C1-7; too many obstacles crammed in to the space. Removing just two of the jumps would have made the course lovely, by giving the dogs chance to extend and removing a few of the more awkward traps. The C4-5 Agility preceding it was also very challenging for the level. Not sure what that was about, but the course was not my favourite. Our run was a shambles, oops. For some reason I decided to do a wait start, totally forgetting that Rio stresses about being left with lots of unpredictable dogs behind her (ie. a situation that is never more evident than at Myerscough). She set off and then fell over and scratched (yay stress). Weaved nicely, decent pull-thru (still slow on the static front cross), then flew off down the line and did the last jump, then came back through the tunnel, tried to bounce the jumps at the top and then brake (fail, pole!). Nice flick-flack, then waaaay too much acceleration down the line, missed the turn and then missed the pull-thru as well. SHAMBLES. Not sure if that was due to the ridiculously long queue, or just the poor course. Maybe she was just fed up of boring pull-thrus and wanted to run some. Her jumping was better in this course, so I’m not sure what was going on with the early takeoffs in C1-7.
Dylan’s Anysize course was theoretically really nice, but actually too much accel/decel for the old dogs. We got E’d pretty early so we made something up, and Dylan had a great time, so it was a win nonetheless.