Q IT UP!

Day 3 of Abby and Zack's first official agility trial has come and gone.

Abby's brain appeared to go on vacation today. In the two courses she ran (and I'm using the term 'ran' loosely), she didn't get very far. On her first course, coming out of the chute (the first obstacle), she stopped to shake her 'do back into place with an energetic abandon that seemed to have scattered her wits to the wind. She jumped over the next jump after due consideration, and then let her mind and body wander elsewhere. No amount of cajoling, wheedling or entreating could get her to continue on. Ah well. There was still the Jumpers run in the afternoon. That surely would go better. I put her down in front of the first jump and took off at a run, giving her the command "jump". She turned around and promptly began a major exploration and inventory of all the ground in front of the jump. Once again, no amount of persuasion succeeded in garnering her attention. The more I called to her, the farther away she wandered from the start gate. OK. Obviously she's "not quite ready for prime time." Some days are just like that. Yesterday, she ran a good Standard course, but was just a little too slow to get a "Q"—a qualifying score.

Zack did a 180-degree turn from his less-than-stellar Saturday performance, however. We were the first folks on the course this morning, running with Cindy and her dachshund, Joe, in the Team event. This was our primary reason for having entered the Trial: Joe needed a Q in this event in order to get his Starters Games Dog of Canada title. He had already qualified in the other three 'games' events. Alas, when we looked at the course, there was Zack's dreaded nemesis of the day before...the dogwalk. I apologized to Cindy before we started, as I fully anticipated that Zack would bomb out on the dogwalk like yesterday. Surprise, surprise! After an initial hesitation about a third of the way up the dogwalk ramp, he suddenly decided that this piece of equipment wasn't a problem. And that was that. Lickety-split around the rest of the course. Q!!!

Next up: another Standard course. As mentioned above, Abby threw in the towel on this one after just a couple of obstacles. Zack breezed through. Q!!!

At the end of the day (it was going on 5 p.m. by the time they were running the Starters Jumpers course), and after the infamy of Abby's failing to even cross the start line, I headed into the ring with Zack. Aside from my momentarily forgetting which jump we were heading to at one point, we breezed through this course as well. Q number 3!!! (Cindy has since uploaded videos of the three qualifying runs to YouTube. Links to them are on the sidebar. Thanks Cindy!)

So, we're very proud of Zack, to say the least. And we know we have some work to do with Abby to keep her focused on the job at hand. She's great at agility once she gets herself kicked into gear. I guess we just have to work harder at finding which key to turn in her ignition!

Zack rests after a hard day of competition.