Saturday, September 29, 2007

big events elsewhere

I've been glued to my computer screen and bascially very unproductive since Friday watching the FCI Worlds in Norway. Well, watching the courses, results and some of the clips available on youtube and on Eric's site(http://fci2007.agilityvideoservice.com) discussing with friends and cheering on the various teams. I wanted to try out some of these challenges so badly that I set up the Large Individual Jumpers yesterday. Hmmm...... three off-courses on my first try with Uma :-) OK, so maybe we're not quite there yet... But now I have tons of motivation and lots of ideas for practice.
There's a little bit of a controversy surrounding the mysterious non-appearance of the Polish Large and Small teams. Two dogs which qualified, Christine, a terv from the Large team, and Scotty, a border terrier from the Small team, never made it to Norway, for reasons unknown to me. Apparantly, all this happened at the last moment, no alternates were called on and the Polish teams simply did NOT run. This is so very very very Polish. Only the medium team ran and placed 16th out of 23, the last teams with no off-courses.
Anyway, congrats to the American Large team for Second Place, their runs were awesome and I am still crossing my fingers for Carrie Jones and Jive who are in contention for the individual medals.

The second event, not so big, but very cool, is the ASCA Nationals. I can't wait for updates from New Jersey! Lisa and Dust are competing in the ASCA Agility finals, as is Adriana with Certik (who, I think, is also in the stock finals on ducks). Victoria, with Mira's sister Rosie and Mira's niece Sylvie, is in the Obedience finals. Mirjam with Twix are in the conformation invitational (and finished #1 conformation bitch for 2007), so I am keeping my fingers crossed for everyone.

Training-wise, this week I spent two sessions on weave pole drills and the easy command into the weave poles after a line of jumps, playing around with the spacing of the jumps to get her to slow down and not crash. In the first collection drill I did, she broke a wooden jump bar with her chest, so... maybe this IS indeed what we need. I've also been doing tons of general weave pole drills with Uma, less with Malcolm, who gets bored more easily. In the WC course I discovered the need for stronger call-offs on long lines of jumps, so that will be something I work on now.

I'll see if I can embed a youtubte video posted by someone else of Malcolm last week. This is Jumpers, if the clip works. The barking isn't him, it's some dog at ringside. Let's see:

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