Bathing & Jumping

It's that time of year when Maisie likes to take her daily dip in the horse trough :o) & the other day Billy had his annual bath - in the human bath at home, of course, with warm water, shampoo and fluffy towels.


HATS show at the weekend - gloriously sunny, shame to be indoors really! Maisie ran nicely - clears in both classes. I think she's actually working away a little better - maybe I've changed handling a bit from running Tim? And Tim did some nice stuff in the pre-comp classes - unusually, there was a tyre in the Agility and unfortunately it was set at medium, like the jumps, and poor Tim was confused and tried to fly over it!!! Thankfully no harm done and next run I, and others with baby large dogs, asked the Judge and adjusted the tyre to large - Tim flew through it with no loss of confidence, good boy, pheew, lesson learnt. He just ducked round a jump but otherwise nice run. He ran a nice clear in the Jumping in 17 seconds which was "only" fast enough for 5th place! Some other very fast young dogs played too. I lost us a couple of seconds with a scruffy wide turn, so he was up there on time again really. With the lovely spring eves we're doing 5 minutes of training quite often and it seems to be suiting him. He's jumping large easily but can still duck under when the jump spacing is tighter, so we're working on that. This weekend at Lincoln he is running in Anysize at medium, and it will be interesting to see how that goes ... It's going to be a big 10-ring show! I'm reluctant to do much more competing not at full height as he gets in the ring and runs differently to how he does in training - faster and flatter - and I don't want that to become habitual coz that may just lead to running under large jumps again. So I guess we'll just keep up the training and hoping that his jumping confidence gradually grows and that "muscle memory" thing happens ... He's come a long way already as he limbo-ed under small jumps when we started!! Everything else is great - super weaves, etc. and whilst very forwrad-going he does really try to listen/watch and be a Good Boy and we're gradually learning together.