The early part of my agility season was clouded by Rhyme not being right. Mostly he appeared sound except for 2 cases of right front leg lameness. One for a day on the Wednesday before Scunthorpe Champ and one for 2 days for the Wednesday and Thursday before the Performance weekend. In between for all intents and purposes he appeared sound.
Not only did I miss running in these shows but we could not start our fitness and training programme that I had planned. Well I could have done mine it was just I had lost the motivation. I did continue with keeping my weight down but did not loose anymore.
After several physio sessions,a chiro treatment and some swimming we are looking like being on the right track to start working on fitness. I was also lucky in that although I am not officially part of the Agility Team GB I do help out a lot which meant that Maria Johnson kindly spent some time on him and pointed us in the right direction to getting sorted.
My chiro Christine East thought the time was right to see how he was and get in the ring at the SKC show. The result was that we made the final even though we were both a bit rusty and we had not done any of the training I had planned.
Goal 1 of the year - get to a champ final met :)
This weekend we had Nottingham champ show and with the Agility Team GB training day on the Monday after to prepare for I still did not have much time to get moving forward with my training programme for us. (Again I possibly could have squeezed in some running!).
I was running first in the Champ Agility with a large course that totally confirmed that doing some running training is a definite on my list. Thank you Peter and Tricia Elms for giving me the motivation I need for that. TBH Alan Short's Cruft's singles on Sunday would also have been done a lot better if my footwork skills were better. So no Crufts single points for us
We did however deliver a clear for our Crufts Team the Scunthorpe Hustlers and so did all the others meaning the goal/dream of competing at Crufts again has been achieved.
So next weekend is Hinckley show I wonder if we can make a hat trick of goals achieved.
The choices are :
1. Make another championship final which would continue me towards my new goal of achieving 50% of champ finals this year.
2. A clear in top 10 of Olympia qualifier
3. A clear in top 10% of Crufts singles (actually we may have done this week as there were other 300 dogs in the class so 30th place would have given us that)
Other things I am working on around shows is doing all the classes I have entered. I often just focus on the 'important' ones and miss the tannoy announcements for the others as my brain isn't focussed enough on them. Next year when I have Pikachu to run I will need my wits about me to get her classes in too. The other one is embracing the number of foot steps I do at a show as I am working on 10k a day average in a belief that it assists me with keeping my weight down :)
