Agility Trial Day 1

I am very pleased to say that Heffner was GREAT today at the trial! I usually keep him out in the truck away from all of the commotion. Today, I set him up in his soft crate with an x-pen around our area and he did great! There was no whining, there was no pawing at the crate. I was able to leave him for bits of time and there was no barking or snarking at other dogs passing by. It was soooo great! There were still grumbles, but we are DEFINITELY seeing improvement!! Yay!! He even got to meet an adorable springer spaniel and was very well behaved.:o) Now on to the runs!
Sorry that the image is so small, I just scanned it and didn't do anything else with it. Mostly because I haven't tinkered around with anything to figure out how. That will come eventually. The JWW course was our first and was a pretty nice course. There were some tighter turns along the way, but nothing like what they had for Excellent! I am incredibly proud to say that Heffner NAILED the course! We qualified and took first place! He was soooooo good! He nailed his weave entry on the first try and even stayed on course when I almost threw him off a couple of times. It was lovely and fluid and I was soooo proud of him! He didn't get distracted once!
The Standard course would have gone better if I had kept everything together better in my head. Unfortunately we didn't q because we got a refusal on one of the jumps because of a cross that I forgot to put in. And then I'm pretty sure he missed his up contact on the dog walk. It was an okay course, but I did NOT like the beginning. We went from a jump to a tunnel to a chute. Ug! He did it well, but it definitely killed any momentum we could have built up. I meant to put a front cross in before he got to the weaves, but forgot, which put me on the wrong side. I realized this too late to really even try to do a functional rear cross and that's where we got the refusal. Then I didn't get him going up to the dog walk terribly straight so he did a sort of side ways trot onto it, missing the up contact. Oh well. He did stay with me the entire time and was a very good boy. I really can't complain (especially since I'm the one screwing us up!).

No trial tomorrow, but we're going to the PetUtopia Fall Festival. I hope everyone is having a good start to their weekends!