'Twas a GREAT Weekend!

I have good news indeed to share! This weekend was another successful agility weekend with Heffner! He continues to stay focus and work with me and I am just so proud of him! Now if only he could have a handler who could get her stuff together. Oy!

I apologize for not updating yesterday. After getting home from the trial there were some chores around the house to get done, time spent with the dogs, and a pent little fawn girl who needed some exorcising (and yes, I most certainly spelled that correctly!). Time just got away from me.

Yesterday morning we were the very first dog in the ring for Novice Jumpers With Weaves. It was a lovely course that flowed very nicely and I was looking forward to it. The good news is that Heffner did great with what I gave him. The bad news is, I pretty much bumbled it. We knocked two bars. Yuck! Naturally, the knocking of the bars was due to me. For the first bar, I botched a front cross. For the second one, I just was lack luster and didn't fully support it before moving on to the next jump. Heffner was great though! Kennedy was there competing with Vegas and our ring times didn't overlap (Excellent Standard was running in the next ring), so she was able to capture our run. For good or for ill, at least it's a learning experience for me. And it's okay if you feel bad for Heffner!LOL

Novice Standard went much better. Or at least while we were running the course. Usually Heffner's pretty good at tuning things out once he's in the ring. For whatever reason he ended up fixating on this wire haired mixed breed dog that was running shortly after us. Our set up at the beginning of the run was a little rough. I knew that once I got his attention back and we started running, we'd be fine. Thankfully the judge was very understanding. If it was a situation where I felt like he was out of control at all, we would have just walked out. For whatever reason, he just got fixated on that one dog. No idea why. But like I said, our Standard run went much better than Jumpers! Well enough that we qualified and finished our Novice title!! Woo hoo!!! Which meant that we got to move up for the next day to Open Standard!! Here's the video:

Today we started of with JWW again and I was hoping that we would be able to qualify and move up and be completely out of Novice. Unfortunately, the bad handler struck again! Ug! It just wasn't pretty at all. Heffner was great, but didn't really get a whole lot of help from me. We REALLY need to start using rear crosses more. He's about 75% on them and I just need to trust him and start using them. Maybe then I won't completely butcher the courses. It was a shame too because it was a nice Jumpers course with NO tunnel.

Our last run of the day was our Open Standard run and I am very pleased to say that it was a qualifying run!! He did sooooooooo well! At one point he did take an off course jump, but he had so much momentum going and I just didn't turn my body ahead of time enough to really cue him well enough to turn. Essentially I was facing the jump that I didn't want him to take instead of turning my whole body to get him to go by it. But he totally rocked the 12 weaves! And I am VERY proud to say that he nailed every single one of his weave pole entrances this weekend! I'm pretty damn proud about that!

This morning Heffner also got a little acupuncture treatment from my friend Rachel who's a vet and happens to run a boxer in agility. Heffner's only had one treatment previously and I totally noticed a difference after that one treatment. Today I noticed the same thing. He was just happier, livelier, and just moved so freely. It's something that I would LOVE to do weekly for him, but the cost for doing it around here is prohibitive. Or at least if I want to be able to do anything else with my dogs. And Rachel currently practices too far away for it to be a reasonable drive for me. I'll do it as often as I can because I have been so pleased with the results for him.

Anywho, now I'm pretty much beat and need to get ready to return to the real world tomorrow. I hope everyone had a great weekend!