Boogie had to get measured before he could compete and his event was the first of the morning. We got there about an hour early so that Mike could walk Boogie around a lot to get him to relax his muscles so he would stand "shorter". This is also why we had Boogie groomed as short as possible. Let me tell you, as it turned out we needed every single hair off of him that Alison pulled and shaved. That coupled with a bit of work on Mike's part to get him to slouch this morning, he measured exactly on the limit. Phew!
The borders were showing (conformation) at exactly the same time as Boogie was scheduled to run in agility. I got to watch a couple minutes of conformation before I had to head to the agility ring. These two pictures are of our Sunkist friend, Simon, with Alison handling him. Unfortunately I had to leave before little Book'n got to show.
I could kind of see the people walking around the conformation ring from where I was standing to watch agility. I saw just enough to see that Alison stood in the Best of Winners spot again. How cool!
But Boogie wasn't concentrating on Alison today (he never got to go over to the conformation area today). He had agility on his brain. We only entered him in one run a day - Open Jumpers with Weaves as he just needed one more Q for his title.
As it turned out Mike and Boogie were to run right after a cute Italian Greyhound. Man, that dog was fast....but it ran fast right out of the ring after just a few obstacles to check something out. It eventually came back and ran like a flash.
Boogie was next. He and Mike were beautiful. Boogie got distracted for just a second at one point when he looked over to see what the IG had been looking for. But Mike got his attention right back.
They were so smooth! When the scores came out, Boogie ended up in 1st place! And there were over twenty 12" dogs. His time was faster than any of the small or medium dogs. It wasn't until you got up to the Border Collie times that he started having any competition. Way to go Mike and Boogie!
We decided we might as well move him up to Excellent for the remaining days. Get this: there are 54 dogs just in the 12" Excellent class. Excellent jumpers for tomorrow is expected to go from 7:45am - 2:00pm. This is one huge trial! We've never done anything in Excellent in AKC so this should be interesting.
Even though we had only been there two hours, I could barely walk at all. So unfortunately we had to take off right away. Darn, I really wanted to hang out in the sunshine, watch our friends and visit some more but it just wasn't in the cards.
We were home by 10:30am and the plan was for me to stay in bed the rest of the day. But at 4:30, Mike went up to check the mail and Boogie's tracking harness had arrived. I'd been anxiously waiting for that for a while so I was excited to go out for Boogie's first tracking session.
So we hopped in the car and went to the grassy area around the fountain at Fountain Hills (where Mike and I used to own property). We did three tracks, one each of 10, 15 and 20 yards. Since all three of us are totally inexperienced, we fumbled around and I'm sure we didn't do it exactly right. But Boogie was excited and participated with much vigor. Even though I don't know what I'm doing, I did find out one thing we need to work on. Article indication. We had worked on it at home and he was great. But out in the real world there was just too much excitement.
Even with Mike being tracklayer, I'm finding that tracking is very difficult for me with my current health status. It's so frustrating. And doing it when I was already in so much pain wasn't such a good idea. I know, Mike told me so. Blah, blah, blah.
This isn't the difficult part.
Debbie
3/5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment