Q's

Since one-half of our human family had Presidents’ Day off as a holiday, I decided to take a vacation day myself, and we attended a one-day agility trial on Monday. We just brought Django and Maebe, and only entered them each in a few runs, but they had a good time.

Django had a goofy Jackpot run to start off the day. Often his first runs of the day are silly as he burns off a little steam. Our first Standard course was pretty fast and flowing though, so I was optimistic about it. The run itself went nicely, except that Django blew his A-Frame contact! Django NEVER blows contacts – I couldn’t believe it. We still had one more chance for a Standard Q, but the second course was considerably more difficult, with some tricky obstacle discriminations, and a few tunnel entries that were not terribly obvious.

Of course, Django does tend to actually do better on the more difficult courses, and he ran the second course very nicely, earning 2nd place and a Q! The only slight wrinkle in the performance was my fault. As we approached the final tunnel, I got worried that he would choose the wrong entry and get an off course, negating our perfect run to that point. In my concern, I basically called him off the tunnel, even though he was heading for the correct entry. At that point he started to head over to the wrong entry, since I had inadvertently made it clear that his first choice was incorrect. Being the good boy he is though, he turned around again when I called him, and I directed him back into the correct entry. Our biggest hindrance lately has been my not trusting him and babysitting obstacles more than I need to, which slows us down and causes unnecessary confusion. I know I am getting worse about that lately, as we are only about 12 legs away from earning our C-ATCH title, and I think in my excitement I am just trying to make every run count.