Rain. Next year we must all pray to the agility gods well in advance, and ask that if rain is required, let it be light and drift over the showground quickly. Because this year, it rained relentlessly, heavily, and wetly for 2 days before giving us all false hope with 12 hours of sunshine. And then it rained again.
Mollie
Maybe there should also be a prayer to the agility gods saying “Deliver us from Mollies”. It would be apt. She is so much fun to run, although in the class where she ran away for 40s before she even did the first jump and then barked at me the whole way around and launched off all the agility equipment in a very dangerous and reckless manner, I may have argued otherwise.
She did get one clear round though, and came 14th. Sometimes, she can be a clever girl.
Kim
My little girl was not so happy with me this weekend. She didn’t really want to play agility so much, apart from the occasional mad sprint. In her final run of the weekend, she walked in ahead of me, plonked herself in front of the first jump and gave me a look that clearly said “let’s just get this over with, shall we?” and that was the end of that.
It makes me sad, because I know sometimes she really loves this game and wants to play and can win classes with it. But equally, sometimes she doesn’t want to play anymore, and the balance feels like it’s tipped to the “not” right now, and so I’m not going to keep entering her in the hope that we’ll have one good run. Finals Weekend will be her BAA retirement party; their Veterans classes offer nothing we don’t already have in Novice, except lower jump heights, and jump height isn’t the problem here.
She will continue to do the KC shows, but I will be increasingly selective about what classes we enter, especially if she does win out of Grade 5.
Although Kim didn’t want to play, Dylan suddenly did.
Dylan
The boy did good.
Final haul is:
1st Introductory Jumping (the required second win for Primary Jumping)
1st Introductory Power and Speed (one win of the 2 required for Primary Agility)
2nd Introductory Jumping
2nd Introductory Agility
3rd Introductory Jumping
3rd Introductory Agility
4th Introductory Steeplechase
5th Introductory Jumping
7th Introductory Helter Skelter
8th Introductory Steeplechase
9th Introductory Agility
19th Introductory Snakes and Ladders (should have been an E anyway, but held contacts)
He stepped up a gear, finally. He stepped up several gears. He’s still not quite running at top speed, but it’s much, much better than it has been. His dogwalk was above average, his contacts were solid, his waits went out of the window, but I suppose we can’t have everything!
Of course, this does give us our promotion wins for Jumping, and if it had been earlier in the season, I would have moved Dylan up to Primary. The placings this weekend prove that he is ready to move on from Introductory classes. But – there’s always a but! – our next show is Finals Weekend, and he is currently qualified for both Introductory Finals. If I move him up, he doesn’t qualify for any Finals, and we would get automatic promotion to Novice at the end of the season, which I would quite like to avoid! Thankfully we only have 1 Agility win so I at least don’t have that one on my conscience, and I held all his contacts in all the other Agility classes after that win to make sure we didn’t get close.
Kim does have the last laugh, as always. She won me boxes of beautiful silver photo frames, which I treasure, use and display proudly on my shelves. Dylan has won me boxes of horrible mugs which I will look at sadly, cannot bring myself to display, and will never, ever use.
Katie and I ran Jet in Duo Pairs and came 7th, which was quite respectable! I then ruined that respectability when I ran Jet and Dylan in Brace Pairs, and got 60 faults (2 refusals and an E), especially as Katie ran Poppy and Mollie and only got 55 faults. Neither of us ran in the Circular Knockout and then promptly wished we’d entered Jet and Kim as they both would have loved it.
Major congrats to everyone else who had fab placings this weekend.