Nottingham

I haven’t been to Nottingham for years; last time we competed there, Kim was a large dog. Way back when! The show is still really well-organised and it’s a lovely atmosphere, but the ground is awful to run on (pitted and rough, worse in some rings than others) and there is absolutely no shade offered anywhere. Which this weekend was a big thing!

Kim was sloooooow on Saturday. She got 2 unplaced clears, in her Grade 5 Jumping and Combined 4-5 Jumping. The agility was a write off as she went straight up the Aframe.

We absolutely fried on Sunday. Saturday was warm, but Sunday was hot. Even when Kim ran her first run at 8:45am it was baking hot. Despite liberal applications of suntan lotion I am a nice pink colour (not the look I was going for!) and by lunchtime I was ready to find a shady spot and never move again.

Lovely course for the Combined 4-5 Agility, but Kim was not feeling the start and came to a dead stop before the second jump. Incredibly lucky not to get a refusal; she glared at me for a while and then decided she’d play, and she flew around the rest of the course. Still not going Kim-speed, especially through the weaves, but generally a nicer run than we’ve had for a while. Really pleased to see her extending over her jumps! Somehow finished 4th, which was a bit of a shock considering we’d wasted so much time and the class was a fair sized 4/5.

Graded 5-7 was an “interesting” course. Actually, Kim would have loved it had she been cool and fit, but she was hot and un-fit, so it didn’t go quite to plan. She got time faults for pausing on the dogwalk and debating whether to go back and say hi to the person sat ringside (4.851 time faults, which is important later!) but she ran the course well and did all the pull-thrus and flick-flacks with a fair amount of speed. She’s getting much more confident about turning again. She also finished with a flying run down the last line, and looked excellent in her movement. I was happy!

Anyway, it turned out that only 4 dogs out of all the Grade 5 and 6’s got under the course time. Personally I think that considering the heat, the judge should have perhaps extended the time by 4/5s, but as she didn’t, there were loads of dogs with time faults. Kim came 2nd in the end because she was the fastest of the time fault dogs (and incidentally would have been 4th if she’d been a Grade 6).

Clear in the Jumping but oh-so-slow, but it had been a very long day and a very hot day and frankly, I didn’t put much effort in either.

We camped offsite at Oakhill, which is why it looks so flat and calm (photo taken very early on Sunday morning!) The rest of the photos in this post were also taken at the campsite on Saturday evening.

As for Dylan … I don’t know what I’m going to do with him! He’s turning into a consistent clear round dog, but he’s not touching any of his speed and he’s playing everything safe. He’s going for slow and cautious and getting it right, over being fast and reckless and getting it wrong. I always handle him as though he’s going to run as he does at training, which is confident and fast and reckless. Inevitably, he doesn’t run like that.

There were flashes of my usual happy lad. He did some lines or sequences with drive and confidence and really worked the courses. He finished up one of the Grade 3 Jumping courses with a flying final drive, and finished 12th. If he’d run like that the whole way around, he’d have been in the top-5. He set off like a bomb in the Vegas Qualifier, gave me a beautiful seesaw and then one of the best Aframe’s I’ve seen him do recently, but then slammed on the brakes for the final 5 obstacles. Some courses he was generally terrible (Combined 1-7 Helter Skelter springs to mind, although he was only 5s off the winner’s time), others he was reasonably ok (Pedigree Pairs).

He came home with a 12th and a 13th in his two Jumping classes, and a 12th in the Grade 3 Agility. I feel like I maybe should be pleased with that (?) and if he’d been genuinely running as well as I know he can, I would have been. But he wasn’t and I’m not. Hmph!

Congratulations to Emma and Bailey who finally got it all together and won the Combined 1-3 Agility by a decent margin and are now Grade 4, and then finished it up with a 2nd in Grade 3 Agility. To Katie and Jet for their 6th in Grade 1 Agility, and for being set to win the Grade 1 Jumping until Katie went unrehearsed (but now you know she can do it!) To Natalie and Kai for their 6th in the Grade 3 Jumping (P2) and 12th in the Combined 3-5 Vegas Qualifier. To Abi and Solo for their 6th in the Vegas Qualifier, and best wishes and hugs to Cody who popped his kneecap out after hitting a (wooden) pole on Saturday. To Helen and Lucy who won the Combined 1-2 Agility by miles and are absolutely definitely in Grade 3 now. To Julie and Gertie who got another 1st and are absolutely definitely Grade 4 now (and she’s only started KC competing at Easter!). Finally, congrats to Paul and Farley for bringing home some more rosettes from Grade 2.