Connor's having fun in preferred

This was Connor's first trial in Preferred. Actually we did preferred a few years ago when I was trying to build his confidence back, but I've had him in regular classes for more than 18 months now. I realized during the summer that some of what I thought was miscommunicated handling between us could have been him not wanting to jump 20 inches. He is 8.5 years old! Plus he'd been over time in our last few trials. By less than 1.5 seconds, but it was enough to NQ him and tell me those last 4 MXJ legs weren't going to happen.

So I looked up his progression, and he had two Novice Standard legs and two Open JWW legs. He had a ball at 16 inches. Seriously, for a 22 inch dog, he's barely breaking stride to get over 16 inches. We had several wide turns in JWW and he was wagging all over the place, but he nailed his weaves. He took an extra tunnel and jump but still managed to clock in 7 full seconds under standard course time.

Novice Standard was barely controlled chaos! Luckily the A frame was the third obstacle and he hadn't had enough time to build up speed. He hit his contact and managed a tight circle to the dogwalk (HE didn't have a single problem with the entrance and it was the same one Ian had). I beat him to the end of the dogwalk, so he nailed that contact. No table faults, but after the teeter he knew it was time to turn for home and blew past the weave entrance. However, in fairness, when was the last time he'd seen only 6 poles? I turned him around and he got them. Then when he flew over the broad jump, we were hanging onto control by a thread! He managed to hold it together for the last jump, chute, jump combo! A clean run in 30 seconds and SCT was 50 seconds!

I think he likes Preferred! I moved him up to Open Standard for tomorrow. He celebrated with a massage by Marcy and he's now curled up next to me with his head against my leg sound asleep. What a guy!