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Friday, May 27, 2011

JCAC NADAC May 21-22, 2011

Well, this trial sure was interesting. We got to try some boxes and I found out how hard it is to make Elite Proficient Standard SCTs sometimes.

The arena in Prescott was lovely. I would gladly go back to a trial there. The drive from Sun City wasn't that bad either. I even drove home one day!

Blue was a good girl. She Qd 8/12 runs, and was happy, spunky and moving pretty well. We tried a couple of bonuses and she wasn't wimpy like the last few we've tried. She was really close on two out of the three tries. Stupid handler. I'll babble a bit more on the boxes later.

While it's odd that she missed that first discrimination on the second round of Regular on Saturday, I totally should have seen it coming. She only crouches like that for tunnels (and hoops apparently), so I should have stopped and gotten her attention. It doesn't help that she wanted to break her start too. XD She was all over the broken start this weekend. Maybe I should have trained it. Or not. She's old so I don't really care.





Truly's Q number is pending, but she for sure got 6/12 and her TG-O. I say pending because I think the yardage was wrong on one Regular and she missed the Q on time. Speaking of time, this trial made me think that Tru was incapable of making Elite Pro Std SCT. The wrong yardage course probably didn't help, and I kind of gave up on Regular after she had a redirect. I know when she missed the weaves a couple of trials ago, she barely made time. I don't think she's that slow, but apparently she isn't fast enough to make mistakes. I actually thought she's been getting faster, but is it fast enough? I can compensate for that by handling better. We just need to get our timing down.

The other problem is jumps. All Truly pulls off of is jumps. Constantly. She doesn't commit until she is over the jump in a lot of cases. There's probably a way to work on that. Maybe I need to be more consistent or something. I know she gets very 'careful' after messing up, but that's no excuse for not going over a jump that's one stride away. I don't know if she just has no idea what to do with jumps, is lazy, or hurt. I will be moving her to Skilled as soon as she gets her NATCH, but it's gonna take a long time if she wont jump. We were over time in Jumpers because I had to get her over one jump and she missed another Jumpers Q because she ran by the last two jumps. They pretty much right in a row (slight arc to them) and she just whizzed by. Gah.

Now for big brag (after a really rant-y couple of paragraphs, haha). TRULY GOT A 20 pt BONUS Q!!! I can hardly believe she made it, but she did. It was on a box in Regular. Here's the run on video.


I'm waiting for a possible score update to post Tru's other runs. Anyway, that box Q pretty much makes up for whatever failures we had that weekend. So, on to boxes. They are pretty much awesome. I've only done two now, but Blue was so close on both and Tru got one on her first try. My conclusion about boxes is that they are to MY handling skill level, and thus, I will probably do better at them. Blue seemed to like them better too, but that could just be that she was having a good weekend. I just hope more courses get them and they aren't phased out too quickly. A lot of people were willing to try the boxes, and it's usually the same with 15 pt lines. 20 pt lines are just so much harder, I think boxes will encourage more people to work distance, since they seem more doable.

Next agility event is the PIDC. Blue needs to lose some weight, but I was jumping her at 16" a week ago and she looks fine. We'll see what happens. If we get to to again, we get to go again, if we don't, well, I wont have to worry about that, haha. We might be heading to AZ for another trial, but I don't know. I do know that we need to practice!

3 comments:

  1. Nice attempts (and success!) on the bonus boxes! I enjoyed hearing you talk to Truly as you did the box, its quite interesting.

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