Dogs On Top

First show of the month! Katie was supposed to be coming with her hounds too but a couple of inches of snow and she bailed out. I have to admit at some points in the day I wish I’d stayed in bed too!

First run of the day was Open Time Gamblers. Part of me hates running Time Gamblers because it’s not about who has the best run, but part of me loves it because it’s about who knows their dog best! The idea is that you walk the course, and then before you run you have to tell the scribe what time you think you’re going to run. The dog whose time is nearest to the handler guess wins! I guessed 27.2 for Kim and we did it in 28.72, but we had a refusal (which was my fault!) so I think if we’d have run clean I’d have been pretty much dead on. The course was quite nice for Open, just a couple of awkwardly angled jumps, and Kim ran it really well so generally pleased.

We only had about 10 minutes between Gamblers and Primary Helter Skelter, which was one difficult course – I hate Helter Skelter anyway, as I’ve said many times before! – and it didn’t go well. We were E’d at jump 18, which was the jump I thought would catch us out.

A long four hours later … Primary Jumping, and what a course! I have never done anything so difficult with Kim at competition, not even when we’ve done Open Medium classes at KC shows. Usually when we get a tough course we have a better run, but this was just so awful I couldn’t get excited about it. Not only that but Kim was really cold, really fed up and I couldn’t get her excited before we ran, and it was a fairly poor effort by our standards. She set off well and 1-6 was nice, but it all went downhill after that. We finished with 5 for a refusal at the weaves, but still came 14th despite our pitifully poor time, just because there were only 10 clear runs in a class of 60. What really annoyed me however was that my friend Julie’s dog, running immediately after me and Kim, paused in exactly the same place and wasn’t marked. Charlie was E’d anyway at Jump 16 but we were both fairly irritated about it. Actually, I have to say that the judging over the whole day was very inconsistent, and I know a lot of people were upset, either because they were marked unfairly or because they were knocked out of the placings by dogs who had missed contacts but weren’t marked.

We finally got a nice course right at the end of the day in Primary Agility (thank you Sarah King!), but Kim was just too slow on her dogwalk and seesaw, and we ended up 11th.

We haven’t got another competition until March 1st, so at least we can get some proper training done.