Playing with numbers

Ian had an awesome weekend -- his best ever. He won Sunday's Excellent B Standard class and took second place in Saturday's class. Saturday's JWW class was his fastest run ever, more than 7 seconds under SCT and 4.64 YPS. It earned him 3rd place. We walked away with 45 MACH points in three runs.

It's amazing to be a seasoned team and know exactly what your partner will do. I'm pushing us with every run to shave off even more time by pre-cueing turns and getting more lateral distance to get into position (which did bite us on Sunday's JWW run when I got too much lateral distance and put him in the wrong end of a tunnel). It got me thinking just how far we've come on our journey toward his MACH.

Ian finished his AXJ on Oct. 2, 2005. At the time, he was not competing in Standard because he was refusing all contact obstacles. From October 2005 until the end of June 2006, he was only earning MACH points in JWW. During that time he had 10 Qs and earned 39 MACH points. How amazing is it that in 8 months our team didn't even earn as many MACH points as we did in three Qs last weekend!

As we are closing in on the last 88 points to Ian's MACH, I'm really enjoying this time running him. He's an amazing partner and by trusting him and pushing us to continue to excel as a team, we're just getting better.

I had the best compliment this weekend. A woman I've chatted with for the last several months at trials complimented me on my runs that morning in Excellent. I thanked her and then she said, "Every time I'm at a trial with you, I always make sure I watch your runs. You're an amazing handler and you make it look easy." Wow! I'll cherish that compliment for a long, long time.