May First Agility Trial

Lucy and me :)

This was our first trial of the year. We will be going to 2 more weekend trials in May, then break until August. 

I must be a little crazy to be doing this. I came home from my evening shift the day before at midnight. Then up at 6 am in order to leave the house at 7 am to go to the trial, bringing enough  food with me for the whole day. Since May 1 is a public holiday, all the stores are closed, and, as I feared all one could buy at the trial was waffles, hotdogs, candy and chips. I was going onto a night shift and had to go straight to bed when I got home from the trial to get a nap before work. 

Anyhow - I like to get there about 90 minutes early so that we can get set up with Lucy's crate and my chair, go for a walk so that Lucy can go to the bathroom, and also walk around the ring area so that she can get used to all the activity, strange dogs and people, and not get distracted by them when we are in the ring. 

I am only partially satisfied with the results. Our first run, the agility course, had all the challenging equipment and lots of tight turns. Lucy was on the ball, no hesitation on the collapsed tunnel, or the seesaw, not at all distracted by the activity outside the ring; however, in spite of some xtra weave pole training on friday to make sure she could do 12 poles (we've only been practicing with 6 at agility practice), she spent ages in the weave poles. There was also a little hesitation at the last tunnel. Both my fault. I didn't lead up to them properly. We placed 28th of 60 with a whole minute over the maximum time, and 2 faults. A friend filmed the run below:

By our second run, the jumpers course, Lucy was tired, I think. Or maybe it was me. In any case she sniffed between every jump, and spent a year in the weave poles - again. But I was very pleased that she stopped dead and came back to me instead of taking random jumps after  almost going off course. Also I tried leading out a bit to beyond the second hurdle and that also went well. Here we placed as # 30 of 60. With 30 seconds overtime and 2 faults. 

All in all, I see I need to get out the weave poles and train more. Especially I need to get to where Lucy will seek out the entries independantly. I think it would also be usefull to teach Lucy directionals now: forward, right, left and various tight turns. 

And what to do about the sniffing? I think I need to work on motivating Lucy more, both leading up to the race and during the race itself.