Last Friday Chico and I went to All Dogs Gym and did some USDAA agility. We did a jumpers run that was really nice… except for some reason at two points Chico elected to take the backside of the jump (which is the hard way) – with video I might be able to figure out what I did to make him think that was what I wanted, without video, I am still clueless as to what I did wrong. Yes, I’m sure it was me because 99% of the time, Chico does exactly what I tell him to. We also tried Performance Speed Jumping again where I got in a fancy blind cross that I thought was the right thing, that almost no one else did, and got the next obstacle but didn’t realize that I had set the wrong line with my cross and Chico went charging off in exactly the direction my feet said we were going and off course over the wrong jump. Ooops.

Since I was the hospitality committee for the Agility Club of NH trail at American Canine Country and needed to be twenty minutes away from Friday’s trial site at 7 AM, I took a room in Manchester (rather than drive two hours home and two hours back). The LaQunita in Manchester is just fine, thank you very much, and they have sausage patties at the breakfast bar. I don’t care for them, but Chico sure does.

Saturday morning we had our Jumpers and Standard runs. Jumpers was a very nice run, all clean, all on course.

Standard was going very well until the end when I didn’t set a line to the triple jump after the A-frame. Julie was watching and she said I was wrong to call him back because he went exactly where I sent him. Darn.

That night it snowed and then rained, it was quite good to be twenty minutes from the trial instead of two hours away. Sunday morning’s Jumpers run was nice save for Chico running around jump eleven.  It wasn’t 100%-smooth support on my part, but I did have the sense to just carry on instead of making him have a ‘do over.’

And the second run of Sunday, the wild and crazy Standard run, that I already shared with you in my last post. At that point Chico had spent a lot of time in the car (we did quite well in Connecticut the weekend before when we left the trial for a while, took an off-leash walk, did some errands, got a coffee and came back) for three days, a lot of time around other dogs for three days, and ten minutes with a friend while I walked the course. He was a very sticky dog and I did things that require independence. The way he jumped off the teeter as I did my blind cross – that was a hyper sensitive reaction to my movements and I didn’t see it coming, though I could have if I had more quickly synthesized the data from the previous days and half-hour. Oh well, Chico had fun and I learned more about our team’s weaknesses.