Agility Match!

Today Bess and I headed out to Memorial Park in Wilsonville for an agility match hosted by the JAG agility group. I have been putting in a lot of time and retraining with Bess and at least at the practice barn, my efforts seemed to be really paying off. I was getting great focus from Bess and we haven't had any zoomies in the barn in several weeks. I had already planned to enter her in the CAT match next weekend, but Kennedy mentioned to me (she's part of the JAG group) the match today to me and I figured why not!

I was slightly apprehensive in that the match was outside, but I really felt that Bess could handle it. Thankfully I was right!:0) I had planned to enter her in Beginners Standard and Jumpers (UKI courses), but the day was starting to get so nice and our runs had already gone so well that I decided not to stick around and we headed home after watching Kennedy run Vegas and Leo.

We did two runs of the above Standard course. The first run, I rewarded her for her start line stay and then began the course running with her. Which meant that I had to haul butt to the end of the tunnel, and only really processed that as she was starting to enter the tunnel. She did her jumps well, took a rear cross on the dog walk well, as well as a rear cross on the teeter. And ran the course without a hint of the zoomies and payed attention like I had hoped that she would. I reinforced her contacts a little bit, but not as much as I had planned, and I rectified that on our second run.

For our second run I lead out and she handled that perfectly! I also got my butt in gear to race her to the end of the tunnel. I didn't rear cross any of the contact this time, instead reinforcing her stays in the yellow. They went excellently! She did pop out of the weaves early, but that was totally my fault. I started to verbally reward her for doing them early and pulled her attention off the weaves. She's still pretty touchy on the weaves and in practice I make a conscious effort not to verbally reward until she has correctly completed the weaves.

All-in-all, a great way to spend the morning! I came home and got the lawn mowed and gave the dogs some raw meaty bones to mow down on, which made them thoroughly happy. Otherwise I've just been bumming around the house getting little things done. Tomorrow morning I head out with the dogs to my parents' property in Pine Grove to do some hiking and hanging out with my dad. I am REALLY looking forward to that! I am resigned to the fact that somewhere on our hike we are bound to come across those darn wild horses, but at least with my dad camping out there tonight, we won't be pulling into the camp site with a whole freaking herd waiting for us!

I hope everyone is having a fabulous holiday weekend!

P.S. Blogger has been really weird for the past few days and it has made it impossible for me to comment on most blogs. It's been annoying the crap out of me! I'm slightly reassured that it's not just me after reading about a few others having the same exact problem. Hopefully that will be fixed soon!