Monday, February 9, 2009

A weekend without agility. Or was it?

I had so many plans for this weekend. It is the first of three weekends in a row I have off from trialing (maybe more if I don't remember to sent in my entries for the beginning of March). I had SOOOO many things on my to-do list including, but not limited to, my taxes, cleaning the house (omg, needs it!), doing laundry, mowing the lawn and other yard work, cleaning the rv, cleaning the car, cleaning the garage, and so on and so forth. But it ended up being a weekend of... can you guess??? Agility! (and puppy training).

With AKC Nationals around the corner and WT Tryouts not far after that, I'm starting to get into "I'm not prepared" panic mode. I even had a bad dream about a week ago that Icon and I showed up at nationals and couldn't get through a course successfully (hmm, kind of like how I felt running the european course below).

So we've been back into the grove of practicing lately. I had a little course set up in my yard with tunnel discriminations and hard weave entries from back before I went up to portland. It was set up for over a month because I had a bunch of sequences planned for it and I couldn't move the setup until I had run all of them, and due to rain I didn't get to practice as often as I had liked. But I finally got though them all so I was able to clear off and mow my grass on Saturday morning. The puppy was really happy to have a yard to run around on without anything to run into.

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Icon was invited to do European coursework on Sunday afternoon at powerpaws and then by some other people Saturday afternoon at shamrock. I didn't really want to go on both days, but I was worried that we would get rained out at least one of the afternoons so I agreed to both. Well it turns out that it didn't rain either day (it started raining as I was driving home from powerpaws on Sunday) but I'm glad I did do both because Saturday moved pretty slow so it wasn't much running for Icon, and we exposed a lot of holes on both days that need work. So now I have a huge laundry list of things to practice.

The absolute worst, craziest course for me last weekend was a Small/Medium jumping course by Berndt Huppe. I have always known that straight tunnels are our kryptonite (and boy these judges, especially Huppe, LOVE the straight tunnels) and we even had an extra one on this course since we couldn't find the chute fabric and substituted yet another straight tunnel. We were pretty much all over the place on this course and there was so much RUNNING. I thought I was going to cough up a lung by the time I got through it. Apparently, it's not just Icon that needs work. I need to work on my fitness. Ahem.

2008-08-03_jpsmallmedium.gif (GIF Image, 1000x500 pixels) - Scaled (96%)
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We have another practice scheduled for next Sunday, but I suspect it'll be canceled due to rain, which is a bummer. But in the meantime Icon and I have a lot of things to practice in the back yard like tight turns, threadles, serpentines, straight tunnels, bounce jumps, broad jumps, spread jumps, triangles... oh the list goes on and on. I have some other fun

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