Sunday, February 26, 2012

3/3!

Today was a good day for us at Riverside.  Here's a play by play:

Round 1:  Jackpot Level 4
     This was a non-traditional Jackpot and it was a bit of a puzzle to plan.  There was a jump in the middle of the ring that was worth nothing by itself, but doing it successfully meant the next obstacle's points were doubled.  You could do that jump as many times as you wanted but could only do each other obstacle twice, whether doubled or not.  Anyway, Jonah did well in our opening and was much farther along when the buzzer sounded than I had expected he would be.  The buzzer meant we still had 18 seconds to collect points and get to the table, so I improvised and got some more points.  It turned out I played the timing pretty close, as I was within a second of the time, but we got the Q and 1st, and only several dogs in the whole trial had more than our 56 points.  I think most of those dogs were fast small dogs who got more time.  Anyway, it was a fun run.  Jonah's A-frames were excellent, but his DWs weren't.  The DW was pretty wobbly--lots of dogs were bailing or being generally tentative.  Jonah ran over it pretty well but was clearly a little nervous and ran through his 2o2o.

Round 2:  Wildcard Level 4
     This run started with a jump to a tough discrimination that lots of dogs were missing, but Jonah nailed it with another gorgeous running A-frame contact.  Good boy.  The course was running well until we had to jump right next to the crowd.  He got nervous, looked at them, and I didn't support the jump well enough, so he ran past it.  Luckily there are no refusals in CPE, so we just turned around and he picked up speed again pretty well to finish the course much more confident.  We were the only dog in the class, so we got another Q and 1st.  Even with the little incident he had one of the faster times.  I think the fastest dogs were 5 seconds faster.

Round 3:  Colors Level 3
     WE GOT OUR COLORS Q!!!  This was a pretty straight forward course.  I wanted to do a BC but chickened out and did a FC instead.  Other than that, it ran fast and flowing.  Jonah didn't show any signs of nervousness.  We did come in second by less than .1 second, though!  Oh well, I'm super happy to have the Q.  That's all I really want.  Now we're only one Colors Q away from our Level 3 title.  It seems funny to still not be a CL-3 since we already have 20 Qs at levels 4 and 5, but that's just the way things have turned out.

In other trial news, Jonah was mostly very good with other dogs today, and only barked a few times in the very close quarters.  I never blamed him when he did bark--there was just not enough space and people were not very aware of where their dogs were.

Dave and his parents were there watching and Jonah never looked for his dad, which was great.  They were sort of hiding in the spectator corner, and we made sure that Dave was already there before Jonah and I came in.  Dave played with Jonah outside, but once it was time to go inside we stayed separate.  That seemed to work really well.

Overall, it was a great day.  We got home before 2:30 since we just ran the three classes, and now it's time to get ready for having the family over for dinner tonight.  Good day.

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