First competition

Yesterday we were at our first competition this year – and this was Vini’s first competition ever 🙂

I’ve been looking so much forward to this competition as I am so happy about how Sookie and I are getting more and more engaged with one another at training and I’m feeling we are a real team now. I’m so amazed how fast Sookie is running and yet I can control her. So this first competition was kind of a test to see if we have so good communication at competitions as in training. I had only signed Sookie up for two J3 runs and I am so pleased about our runs – no clean runs and some bad timing but I indeed felt we were enganged 😀 First course I missed to tell Sookie in time which jump she was to take and that caused a refusal. Next run two bars down – the second bar was due to I stumbled, which you fortunately cannot see on the video but therefore I was not where I was supposed to be.

Here’s a video of Sookie’s runs:

After Sookie’s two run it was Vini’s turn. As said, this is Vini’s first competition and on top of this it was indoor on carpet. Vini has only run on carpet once before but luckily she has some big paws so she has a good grip 😉 Vini is very social – she wants to meet all the dogs and people! So at the starting area she was busy meeting new friends (read: no stress at all!!). When I told her to stay and walked to the spot where I wanted to start her, she was sitting there like a statue – and I was thinking: has she seen the obstacles here?! She had, when I started her she indeed knew what she was to do: agility!!! She was very nice – we haven’t trained rear crosses much but she did it great the first time, but second time she was dragged to the tunnel – but a clean run – and Vini won this class 😀 Second run we got eliminated. We had a refusal at third obstacle and that was my bad as I started to close to first jump and therefore “told her” to jump long at second jump. Vini speeded up – and suddenly I had to run as fast as I could, and that I didn’t expect 😉

Here’s a video of Vini’s runs:

I stayed and watched the A2 runs. Vini and Sookie are just great – they know when they are working and when we are relaxing – no stress and that’s so great! At one point Sookie was sitting on Randi’s lap and was looking at the dogs running and Vini jumped on the chair next to Randi and sat there and tried to get Randi’s attention (and treats ;-)). Great start of the year!