Vero Trial Recap

I thought I would share some more videos from our weekend in Vero! First, here's our Novice FAST run - a couple of bar crashes, but this was a pretty tight course and Peyton was just a little on the over-excited side. A Q, second place and our NF title!

Next was Excellent Standard. This wasn't a bad run, but when Peyton forgot that he needed to stop on the dogwalk, I got a little flustered and wasn't where I needed to be so he took the wrong end of the tunnel.

Then we had Open JWW and a minor hesitation on my part caused me to get too far behind and Peyton took an off-course. Then near the end a tunnel must have called Peyton's name...not sure if you can hear it on the video, but evidently Peyton did. :)

Saturday's JWW run wasn't much better. I was surprised when Peyton bypassed the weaves so that kinda threw off my handling for the rest of the run. I really need to work on my recovery when something doesn't go as planned!

And finally, our JWW run from Sunday - some good moments, but I don't think I had the best plan for this run.

Overall, it was a great trial and I think for the most part, our Standard runs made up for our Jumpers runs. We seem to be having some difficulties in JWW lately and I think it's because I can't seem to be in the right place at the right time to give him the information he needs. I'm sure we'll figure it out, but in the meantime I really need to do a better job of handling each jump - I tend to forget that I'm not running the same dog that I have in practice and he needs more support from me in a trial. Maybe I need to write notes on my hand to remind me of all of these little things. :)

Some good notes from this weekend...

1. His table is looking so much better!

2. In general, his focus seems to be improving.

3. On Sunday, we had lots of little girl scouts working in the rings and he handled it very well. For those who don't know, he thinks children can be very scary sometimes. (Not that I disagree!)

On a side note, while we were playing in Vero, we had several friends out in Arizona running at the USDAA Nationals. I managed to catch some of the runs on live stream and wow, they were amazing! A huge congrats to Tori and her young Border Collie Rev (from Florida) for winning the 22" Steeplechase event and placing 5th in the Grand Prix finals. I think this was their first Nationals and she had some really incredible runs - if you like watching great agility, you can check them out here.