Wallingford show

Nothing exciting to report I'm afraid - managed 2 clears this weekend, but both in pairs/teams so not even a clear round rosette to show for my troubles. I never really managed to get my head in gear, although Ella was working well. The worst thing to happen from my point of view was not one, but two messed up weaves! Uh oh, as my baby Callum is fond of announcing when he's thrown some food on the floor for the dogs :-)



But as with anything there were some good things from the weekend:
The weather was very, very kind - I have the sunburn to prove it!
I have three wonderful dogs :-)
- Kai was, as ever, delighted to take a turn in the ring and apart from stealing a little girl's uneaten sandwich, behaved impeccably ;-)
- Ella didn't break a startline, made only one mistake on her contacts but quickly remembered her job, and managed to complete 4 out of 6 sets of weaves correctly first time around. Any knocked poles are my responsibility (and actually so are the incorrect weaves really!), and I promise to try harder girlie!
- Diva played some good tuggy away from the rings, was confident and biddable even in the face of the distraction from a loudspeaker, and was her cheerful and friendly little self which makes most everyone smile :-)
My agility friends :-)
Lel & Hattie for being fabulous grooms on Saturday :-)

Today I am grateful for the warm welcome that greeted me when I returned home, from my lovely children and wonderful parents.

Kernow K9 Easter show

We were a bit up against it last week, so it wasn't the most auspicious start to our competition season. The boys were poorly with a sicky/ cough type bug, and the weather report didn't look like it was going to do us any favours either. Thank goodness for our lovely caravan, without which I'm sure we wouldn't have attempted the trip. We left at around lunchtime on Thursday and actually the weather wasn't too bad at that stage - breezy, but sunshine for most of the drive. It was nice to finally be on the road - packing up for that first weekend show takes a bit more time than the rest of the season. It takes a while to get back into the swing of things, but fortunately I have a great husband to help me :-)

A rain storm greeted us when we arrived on site in Wadebridge, and underfoot was already showing signs of being boggy. Still it was better than it was going to get! We awoke on Friday morning to the sound of rain on the caravan roof - a roof which we were very glad of, it felt lovely to be tucked up in the warm and dry whilst the rain came down outside. However when we stepped outside we found there had been so much rain that there were puddles inside our awning - not from a leaking awning, but simply from the wet ground. Needless to say our lovely, clean caravan didn't stay like that for very long. Diva in particular, made sure of that :-)

That Friday I decided to try experimenting with some feeding advice I had been given from my friends at the Smart Clinic. There is no official research into how best to feed agility dogs, so advice is given from research from greyhound racing & sled dog racing. Obviously agility dogs don't fit into either camp, but perhaps somewhere in the middle. What had been suggested was that greyhounds aren't fed on the morning of a race, but are fed a big meal the evening before. Similar to human sprinters I'm led to believe.

I didn't feel I could run her with nothing inside her, so gave Ella a small amount of tinned mackerel which she thought was lovely. As did Diva who tried to dive into her bowl after it :-) That day we had just two runs - jumping & agility. In both classes we had poles down (as you'll see from the video clips below), which could have been put down to handling errors on my part, but seem unlikely as my handling doesn't get better throughout the weekend - if anything it gets worse with the onset of my cold! So it's not an experiment I think we'll be doing again, and in truth whilst in makes sense with greyhounds, we ask a bit more from our agility dogs than just flat out running. It's certainly interesting to think about though, and I'd encourage other people to experiment to work out what works best for their particular dog.



The weekend was wet and uncomfortable for the most part, and I'm still recovering from the cold/ sicky bug that the children gave me from Saturday onwards. But I'm always keen to try and find the positives, so hear is what I came away with from the weekend:

Ella only missed one weave entry in 8 classes, a massive improvement from last season :-)
Even when poorly, I was able to do some pretty decent handling :-)
My agility friends are many and spread all around when I wander around a show :-)
A hot shower can overcome the most negative weather :-)
I'm capable of reaching the goals I set myself, against big odds :-)

Today I am grateful for my mum who took such good care of my boys for me today whilst I felt ill. None of us would be anything without family and friends, and I'm so very lucky with mine.