Catching up

Well, it has been months since I’ve blogged. Shame on me! I’m sure it’s because of how busy I am between work and trialing so much. Here’s a run down of the last few months:

May 24-25
Ian was in his third USDAA trial of his career; his first weekend in Masters. Ian earned 6 of 8 masters Qs including winning Masters Jumpers on Saturday, beating Linda Mecklenburg’s Super. Of course, he won the class because everyone else NQ’s and he was at least clean – not nearly as fast as the rest of the field but at least clean!

May 10-11
Connor humored me by performing very well in Veterans Obedience at the White River Golden Retriever Club’s specialty. Maybe he knew it was Mother’s Day weekend, so he did his best. He was such a great guy, winning second place (out of three) both days.

April: Big problem – Devon is hurt!
After battling a weird rear leg issue for about 3 weeks, we got the diagnosis. Devon pulled her iliopsoas muscle in her rear left leg in mid-March field training. After several consultations and talking with people who had battled this injury, I was told this was a minimum of a 6 month recovery period. My plans for getting her Junior Hunter title in May and trying for her Senior Hunter title in the fall went right out the window, along with all the agility training we had planned. I went to the drastic step of restricting Devon to leash walking only and no horse play with the other dogs. We were going to get this healed! I missed my training partner!

March: 2008 AKC Agility National Championships
We drove to Tulsa, OK, for our first AKC Agility National Championships! We drove out with Indiana team Ruth Goode and her Border Collie Zina. They were great traveling companions, and boy did we have a great time! We spent a lot of time with good friends Sarah and Esteban Fernandezlopez from Texas who were there with three dogs, Denver (Aussie), Gypsy (Gaylan’s Golden) and Sammie (Rottie). One of the highlights of the weekend was watching Esteban and Sammie in the Challenger Round – and they almost won it! We also caught up with Susan Anderson and her Belgian Ring who we met at the AKC Invitational in December. Susan is one of the nicest people in the world, and I got to meet her mischievous and adorable Belgian boy Lee, who was 7 months.

Ian was 3 for 5 that weekend, double Qing on the team tournament day and only getting one Q during the actual Nationals competition. Those stupid weave poles got us again! Oh well. I only wanted one clean run Q ribbon as a souvenir, and Ian won it for me. On the up side, we got some beautiful photos of Ian thanks to Great Dane Photography. I ordered a large 16x20 collage of Ian’s photos, and it was beautiful!

Mid-February
After what I thought was Ian just being goofy and coming out of the weave poles (see Feb. 2 post), I discovered he was hurt and it was causing him pain as he was weaving. Did I ever feel rotten for getting on him in the poles! Unfortunately, even after we got him put back together, I had caused a performance problem in the ring. Suddenly we were having stress issues with the weaves! Less than 100 points from his MACH, and we suddenly had a less than 40% Q rate!

I also decided to pull Devon from agility competition. Over the winter is a rough time to train when you don’t have a large indoor training facility (I have a small indoor facility). So I figured we’d take the summer off to train.