Excellent!

Triumph had a pretty good showing at the AKC trial this past weeknd in Arcadia, Florida earning his open standard tile and his open jumpers with weaves title!  He qualified in 4 of the 6 runs and came home with three blue ribbons and one yellow.


I ran him in 20" for the first time all weekend and while he over-jumped a few jumps and left early on a few as well, he did seem to settle in to the height and he seemed to be thinking a little more about his job instead of mindlessly blasting around the course. 

But, oh, do we have so much to train and so much work to do!!!  He is still diving into his contact position and is still not shifting his weight back on the teeter and he definitely could have a faster table position!  However, his start line stay was much improved and he never missed a weave entry and never came out of the poles in the 6 runs.


His first standard run was going nicely until he decided it was time to do a running aframe right into the chute...I marked it and asked him to sit and we were eliminated for training in the ring...yeah but...he knows better!


He earned his open jumpers title on Saturday and so I moved him in to excellent for Sunday - he was the last dog to run.  I now had two dogs to run in 20" excellent jumpers so I moved Burn to run first.  Burn had a great run going but ended up taking off way early on the triple, which he has never done, totally crashing into the middle of the jump and ending up in a horrible tumble and fall...it was truly horrifying.  Thankfully, he was okay. 

I almost scratched Triumph from running this course as I was concerned about how he would handle that line to the triple.  I did run him but decided not to get too far ahead of him on that line.  He took off a bit early and cleared it but then I was not where I needed to be and was very tentative so he took an off course...all in all, he did pretty good his first time in excellent.




Sunday's open standard run and title...






Saturday's open jumpers run and title...

Burn's crash...

And Triumph's first excellent jww run...

Go Away Irene!

We haven't shown since the beginning of June (with the exception of DACOF) so am really looking forward to the 3-day AKC trial this weekend in Arcadia, Florida.  This is Calusa Dog Agility Club's very first AKC trial and it is a two-ring one-judge trial.  The site is the Turner Agri-Civic Center...an indoor air-conditioned site on dirt - my favorite!

Triumph is entered all three days and currently has one open standard leg and one open JWW leg...it would be nice to earn these open titles and get him into both excellent classes...that is my hope!  In training, we have been playing around with different jump heights and I decided at the last minute to move him to 20" for this trial...we'll see how it goes.

Burn is entered on Saturday and Sunday and is working on Double Q number 14...we'll see how that goes too :)))

I'm just hoping that Hurricane Irene continues to move in an easterly direction and does not ruin the weekend!  Right now, it looks like that's the path but as we know, all that can change!

border collie conformation and structure

I recently joined a border collie structure group on Facebook...the group was set up for people with border collies to join and then post stacked pictures of their dog for structure evaluation from the other members...it turned out to be a very interesting group of people...in the short lifespan of this group, there were some pretty flaming posts and very ugly comments that went back and forth and unfortunately, there were a couple of members who used the group as a means to attack each other and so the group was shortly deleted because of the animosity that ensued...seems as though there is huge contention in the border collie world between the "conformation" people and the "working dog" people and there are some pretty strong feelings and opinions about what is correct and what is not in the breed...conformation breeders were bashing other conformation breeders and working/performance dog breeders were bashing conformation breeders and conformation breeders were bashing performance dog breeders, etc etc...it made for some very interesting and entertaining reading but it also made me somewhat uneasy to post any pictures of my own dogs...it was then that I actually realized I had not one picture of Triumph standing still, all of his pics are that of some kind of agility action shot :)

So I attempted to take some...ha!!!!  Getting Triumph to stand still and stay in a "stacked" position while I backed up and took a picture of him was no easy feat!!!!

I did manage to get a couple pictures...pictures taken on an iphone do not make for beautiful conformation shots and I also quickly realized that this would be a two-person job!


In the pic below, I hung a toy from a plant post so that he would have something to look at and I told him to stand and stay!  He does have a very nice topline but he was having a bad hair day so his topline looks like there's a hole in it - there is not!  And to me, he looks fat in this picture but he is far from fat!

In the below picture, he was watching Nancy and Rudy work and was peering around a tree - he was just free-standing and this was not a stacked picture

But hey, we don't care what anyone on some Facebook group thinks about his structure...in his humble opinion, he is absolutely gorgeous...and in my opinion, he is perfect! 

jumping experiment

The other night I played around with Triumph at 20" jump height...he ran really nice at the lower height...granted, he has made huge improvements over the last several months at 26", but he still struggles at times with the double and triple especially if I am ahead of him and he is running as fast as he can to catch up...he's never run a full course at the lower jump height, so we played around with that this morning and he ran great especially over the double and triple...his take off was very appropriate all in all with the exception of taking off once or twice a little early and I think he over-jumped a couple of jumps once or twice...I then ran him over a short sequence at 26" and he made the transition very nicely and seemed very comfortable at the higher height...

this is the second course we ran at 20"

and here's a part of the sequence at 26"