Skye-boy's AKC weekend at Castle Rock

We played AKC agility this weekend hosted by the Rocky Mountain All Terrier Club. It was a three day trial, and I took Friday off work so I could do all three days.

The judges put together some challenging & technical courses that caught quite a few competitors, though I am happy to say that Skye and I had a very successful few days.

Overall, we were 5/6 runs and earned 2 more QQ's towards MACH and qualifying for the 2010 Nationals (a goal of mine). It was nice to get back on track after NQ'ing our standard runs at the last trial.

The one run we NQ'd was our first run of the weekend, an Exc. STD course that we darn near Q'd but for an offcourse with a tunnel/AFrame discrimination with three obstacles to go.

I really like courses that make you ponder the best way to handle it, vs a course where its very obvious. The courses this weekend all seemed to have at least one such element in them. I also enjoy when the judges put in wraps, as it's something we practice and can be a time waster for some of the really fast dogs.

Now, being in the 20" Excellent B group has its drawbacks - on Friday we competed against about 45 other dogs, and on Sat & Sun, it was more like 60 - 65 other dogs. Skye runs fast, but isnt "that" fast where I would expect to get a placement against all these other ultra speedies, but on our Standard run on Saturday, we did manage 5th place.

Peeve: How hard is it for the scores to be sorted by time? Sometimes they posted sorted scores, and sometimes they were just in running order. Don't know about you, but I am not about to examine all 60 scores to see where we ended up. Some people may not care, but for me, I like to keep track of how we are improving, and comparing against the other dogs that we always see is a pretty good measure. Just knowing the top 4 dogs wont help me if I'm in 10th place for example. Anyway, Sort the darn scores!!