EMDAC April

Kim

First time in a long time where we haven’t come home with any rosettes from EMDAC. It was just such a disappointing weekend; Kim was incredibly slow. She was responsive and listening, but she had no power or speed in her runs, and a few times she came to a dead stop in front of obstacles that under normal circumstances she would never have refused. On the other hand, I don’t feel like this is a mental problem. She wants to run; I know Kim when she doesn’t want to run, and this wasn’t it.

So I have to assume it’s a physical problem. Ergo, expensive vet and chiro trips are on the very imminent horizon.

Placings were irrelevant, but she came 10th with her two clear rounds, in both cases about 5/6s off the winners. Considering her speed this weekend, and comparing that with her normal speed, I feel like she would have been comfortably challenging for the placings if she’d been running like her normal self.

Dylan

For all that Kim had a terrible weekend, Dylan had a really good one. I feel a little bad because I was so worried about Kim that I could only get marginally enthused about Dyl’s placings; that and I didn’t think he was necessarily running his best on some of the runs where he got placed.

Introductory Agility (Saturday) was first, a nice course with a twist which caught out a lot more dogs and handlers than I thought it would. I held all Dylan’s contacts, which were nice for a change! His dogwalk was a bit slow, but the Aframe was nice and fast, just what we like to see! The results came as more than a bit of a surprise as he placed 5th out of 128.

Intro Snakes and Ladders was a write-off. Technically clear but we ended up doing quite a few of the Snakes, so well out of the placings. Annoyingly, Dylan’s Aframe was really creepy again. I have no idea why it suddenly got so much worse between the first class and the second, but it did, and I can only assume I did something which slowed him up.

Helter Skelter was a really nice course, a proper Helter Skelter with two big loops and then a little loop. Absolutely hundreds of clears, including Dylan, who wasn’t really powering but cruised around comfortably. Somehow we came a very surprising 2nd, I was a bit shocked to say the least!

Introductory Jumping (Saturday) was dead straightforward, but it was the last run of the day and I’d kind of lost the will to live by then. Dylan had a fairly decent run and came 7th.

Introductory Jumping on Sunday was another lovely course, but with some very tight corners on minimum distances, so not exactly suited to Dylan’s long stride. We also ran very early, about 10mins into the start of the class, and it was still pretty damp underfoot. Dylan ended up doing two proper faceplants as he tried to turn on landing, I think it was just a bit slippy for him. We came 13th in the end, which wasn’t too shabby considering he fell over twice.

Introductory Up and Under was fairly simple, plenty of room for my lanky boy! He started off a little lazy but picked up well for the end, and somehow came 4th to effectively finish the weekend for us.

His last two classes were Introductory Agility and Introductory Double Take Agility. Intro Agility was another write-off as he barged past me to re-take the Aframe, so a big fat E there. In the Double Take we were technically clear, and Dylan actually set off at full speed which was a first! Absolutely gunned down the first line of 5 jumps and then slammed on the brakes and crept over the dogwalk and aframe on both counts, really pretty shocking performance. More work is needed to maintain the speed and lose the creeping.

Bit sad to finish on such a low point because Dylan worked really hard for the most part. He didn’t run full-out in all his runs all weekend, but he showed some flashes of potential and if we sort his contacts out, we’re going to be well up there.

Major congrats to Sylvia and Molly who clocked up some fab Novice Jumping placings, to Bob and Lottie for bringing home some excellent Trio points with loads of top-3 placings, and to Emma and Bailey for finally getting it together and having a fab Double Take Agility run!