Tuesday, February 15, 2011

February AKC Trial 1

We went to our first AKC trial of the year this past weekend. I can't believe I didn't make it to any AKC trials until now. No worries though, we have quite a few coming up in the next months :)

AKC has recently come up with a new Agility class called Time 2 Beat (T2B for short). I'll touch on it more in a separate post later, but it will be officially starting on July 1st. Our local trial secretary is very excited to start putting it on, but consequently that means that they'll mostly stop offering FAST once they get T2B going. To let us FAST-fanatics get our fill of it before it's gone though, they are offering it a lot more up until July, so Philip and I are going to try and get our Excellent FAST title before it disappears. Anyway, you are going to see a lot more FAST on this blog in the next few months!

So, on to our trial... Saturday started off with Excellent A Standard, which was a fairly tricky course, and Philip had the case of crazies on it, forgetting who I was or what I wanted :) It's really frustrating when he does this (which seems to be pretty often recently), but at the same time it's pretty hilarious to watch him go insane too.

The Excellent B JWW run was much better though. I had my well-behaved Philip back, and the course had a great flow, so he listened well and completed the course with a Q. This was our first Q in Excellent B and we earned our first MACH points! Philip was in 7th place and earned 12 MACH points in the run - not bad at all!

We had to wait a very long time for our Open FAST run, and the weather was warming up, plus I wasn't feeling so well, but we stuck it out, determined to get our Qs before July :) Philip is generally very good at FAST so far (he's only NQed once in it, and that was because the course was full of mud due to rain, and he couldn't run), so I never stress those runs. The Send Bonus was pretty interesting being set up kind of in a middle of the course with a jump into a tunnel, but it was no problem for Philip. He ran great, we got a total of 71 points and took 2nd place. The first place went to an awesome little Papillon, that dog ran like the wind! This was our second Q in Open FAST, so just one more to go before moving up to Excellent.

Sunday wasn't nearly as good of a day for us, as Philip was back to his crazy self again. On the Standard course, he indulged in his tunnel love, taking each in the wrong direction, and then getting a double dose when I fixed him to go the correct way. He also messed up the weaves and totally skipped the two-on-two-off on the contacts - sigh!

The Jumpers course seems to always go better for us recently, but unfortunately Philip knocked down the very first jump bar, which was disappointing. He also took a wrong course at the very end, but that was probably because I didn't really care at that point and wasn't paying as much attention as I should have.

Oh well, the two Qs on Saturday were still a fairly good outcome for the weekend. Our next trial is in two weeks and we'll have FAST both days, so we should have some Qs there too :)