Wilmslow Agility

On Saturday we went to Wilmslow Agility show at Myerscough college which is just down the road from here and I had decided that, despite having done no training over the summer, I would just enter Faith and Teal and see how we got on. Neither of them are weaving yet and the last show I went to at Myerscough there weren’t any weaves in the G1-2 classes (they’re hard to peg down on the surface there) so I was hoping for the same…alas no…weaves in every ring! So I decided I would run them both anyway and use it as a training exercise and a way of seeing how each of them would react to a competition environment. We didn’t complete a single course and it was all very messy, Teal was at least focused and driven but Faith was off her head and had absolutely no concentration at all. That said, I found a couple of positives to take away for them both.

The most Faith managed was in the Combined 1-2 agility which started jump – dogwalk; I knew before we even started that she would go under the first jump, this is something she tends to do at the moment when there is an exciting piece of contact equipment on the other side, she gets her head down, focuses on the up plank and complete fails to notice the pole above her head! Some shows will double pole these sorts of jumps in G1 but sadly not here so she went under as I expected, we just carried on, I can’t blame her, she’s not had nearly enough training. She then completed the next jump and a ‘star’ of three…onto the A-frame and then down over a jump out to a curved tunnel…they had to jump back and then complete the two jumps again but this time not do the tunnel….this proved too much thinking for Faith so she ran up the A-frame again…we left the ring. In the next class which also started jump – dogwalk (argh!) I set her off and she ran straight up the A frame which was set up to the right of the dogwalk…I’m seeing a theme developing here! Grasping any positive I can from her performance…her contacts were lovely, some of the best in the class…fast and accurate with just a single command to ‘go walk’ onto the dogwalk/A-frame and she ran straight down into her 2on-2off and waited for the release; I think this is probably the one benefit from having not trained, she’s not had chance to ‘un-learn’ this! It’s just everything else we need to work on!

I was most pleased with Teal, I was a little concerned about how she might react to the noise and bustle of an agility show, this was quite a big one for her first ‘go’ at agility competition but she wasn’t fazed at all and in fact she was a little OTT hyper in her first class; she managed to bounce of someone’s chest in the queue!! I was so embarrassed…she does it to me all the time when she’s excited but I didn’t expect her to do it to the woman stood next to me! Her excitement showed, she broke her wait so that I had to replace her and then when I released her she set off like a bullet, did most of the course (except the weaves of course) but missed every single contact including a very dramatic flying seesaw to finish…eek! Back to the drawing board. We had an hour or so to wait for the next agility class and thankfully she had calmed down a bit by then, she missed a couple of jumps which I realised was my fault for running on too far ahead (wait for me mum!!!) BUT she nailed all 3 contacts…nice fast running ones too…result! The small 1-2 jumping was the last class of the day and by this point all the other rings had finished and they were packing up; I don’t know if it was this or whether it was me but she just didn’t feel like she was that up for it in this class, in hindsight I should have had her out for a good while before she ran and played with her and warmed her up. I think she’d got cold sitting in the van (probably should have put her coat on) and she gets a bit ‘mard’ when she gets cold; she was really clingy and missed a few jumps trying to stay with me. All in all I was pleased with her, especially considering how little training she’s had; not just recently but ever….she’s probably had less than 10 training sessions since she started her agility at the beginning of this year!

They’re both entered at Wyre in 2 weeks time but I probably won’t run either of them until we’ve got some training in. Although both are due in season fairly soon and Teal will hopefully be mated so she might not get much training in before then.