Note: I seem not to have scheduled this to post, you ought to have seen it before you saw me fall.

In the middle of last month, Chico and I went to All Dogs Gym, in Manchester, NH, for a USDAA agility trial organized by BARK. We had two runs, a qualifying run in Gamblers and an NQ in Standard.

Gamblers is a game where different obstacles are assigned varying point values. The handler has 25 or 30 seconds to run a course that they make up and that accumulates the required number of points. Then after a buzzer goes off, you have X number of seconds to get your dog to do three or four specified obstacles in the order the judge has predetermined, without the handler crossing a certain line. The “gamble” is handling your dog from a distance.

And here’s the run:

Despite a slightly rocky start, we ended up doing just fine. If you look closely, you can see that my little sports skirt is not the right garment for the job, or doesn’t fit, or something, as I had to hitch it up a couple times during the run. Very distracting.