Flying Poodles

Our NADAC weekend….

The curly girls and I went to a NADAC trial this weekend, my first three-day trial since the bone plate was removed in January.

I am truly tired today. But my knee is way better, and I am feeling way less pain than I was before the surgery. This is wonderful.

Dancer got three Qs this weekend. Her only run in Tunnelers was spectacular and earned her a third place, a Q, a time that was good enough for Elite—and her Superior Novice Tunnelers title (S-TN-N). 128 yards in 26.86 seconds. Her second run in Jumpers (more on the first one below) was also spectacular. She flew through the course, following the flow of the course smoothly and gracefully while I directed her from quite a distance away, since there was no way I could keep up with her She did the 99 yards in 18.60 seconds (5.32 yards per second) and took first in her class. She was the fastest 20″ dog. That run got her the Superior Novice Jumpers title (S-NJC).

So we get to move to Open in Tunnelers and Jumpers, at long last.

Her third Q was in regular, for the first time in months. She did a gorgeous A-frame contact and a less-gorgeous dog walk contact. She took first, but…. it took two tries to persuade her to do the weaves.

She had weave issues all weekend. She didn’t enter the weaves without encouragement ever. Not ever. They were 24-inch weaves… maybe that was an issue? I don’t know.

Training issues arose. I need to work on:

*independent weaves
*contact behavior
*distractions

(Dancer’s first run in Jumpers was not a success. She came into the ring already nervous and upset, as we were following an extremely badly behaved Belgian who had barked a lot and nipped his owner (among other things I saw) and managed to get it together to take the first jump, which is when she looked up and saw the photographer sitting on the top rail of the arena (it was a horse arena), with the light behind him, creating a HUGE black silhouetted figure at the end of the arena. You could tell she was upset and scared, but she ran toward him, barking and yelling at him to get away from her mom. I love it that she’ll defend me even when she’s scared. As soon as I whistled and went the other way, she came to me, but of course our run was over at that point. Oh, and did I mention that the idiot gate steward told us we were next up by saying: “Dancer, be nervous!” which I thought was terrible. I told her that later–after I’d calmed Dancer down and we’d gone to meet the photographer, who morphed from a terrible scary 15-foot giant into a normal human being, right before Dancer’s eyes–and she (the gate steward) told me she was “just trying to be funny.” Ha… Ha… NOT.)