Sunday, October 28, 2012

Three

Looks like that was the magic number this weekend.  Lyric, unbelievably went on to Q in standard all three days!  I'm so proud of her.  She did such a great job on each run-placing third each time.  Her speed was not tremendous but each day she got a little faster and today earned a very respectable 15 points.  This gave her a total of 34 points for the weekend ( would have better if it was 33 huh?)  She had three pretty lackluster jumpers runs though, getting three NQs with skipped poles and knocked bars-mostly related to lack of motivation and and rhythm.  Not sure what's up with that.  Hopefully she's a lot perkier with two full weekends of NADAC coming up.  (I was hoping for a QQ today because it would have been her third.  No such luck.)

Legend refused contact obstacles in standard all three days but had three picture perfect jumpers runs.  But knocked a bar driving around a corner on Saturday.  It's so sad to me that she has developed this phobia. At this point in her career we should just be running for fun and enjoying whatever happens.  Anyway, this has earned her at least a temporary hiatus from the standard ring.  Really, there is no point.  She's stressed, I'm stressed and chances are we are not going to Q (that seems like three pretty good reasons).  Probably a more effective plan would be to also relieve her of all classes with contacts in NADAC as well but that's not going to happen.  Again, three reasons-we are relatively close to a NATCH, I want to try and go to championships next fall, and refusals are not called in NADAC so technically we can still Q.  We may not be proud of it but we'll take what we can get.  Once all that is accomplished I can reevaluate the situation.  Meanwhile we will just keep training-you never know, she might get over it!

And because I am a crazy person, after getting up at 5:30 in the morning to drive to the trial on Saturday I had entered a twilight 5K in the neighboring town.  The same place as our 5K fail from over the summer-we decided to go back and do it right this time.  So after hanging out all afternoon I ended up running my second best time of the year and placing...you guessed it...third in my age group!  Good thing too, because had it not gone well I was really going to resent that I had to get up at 5:30 again this morning.


Currently, I am exhausted.  Why do we do this again?

8 comments:

Greg S said...

Congrats for Lyric - that is great. Did something happen that would cause Legend to avoid contacts, or just something that appeared all of a sudden?

Diana said...

Wow, you are crazy. I dont know how you had the energy to do that. LOL Congrats on all your "threes" this weekend!!

Nicki said...

Greg-nothing happened that we know of. But it has been a slowly progressive problem over the last few years. Only at trials, and generally if it happens it's early in the course which is when she usually displays her trial stress.

Greg S said...

That is odd - a friend had an issue like that after her big fast lab fell off an unstable dogwalk at a trial. He would do contacts fine at home or at the training center but at trials he would not do them at all - it took about 6 months to get him comfortable again, but at least we knew why he had issues with them.

Karissa said...

Congrats on your great weekend of threes! :o) And YAY LYRIC for doing your teeter!!

I hope Legend gets past this rough patch. Secret started bailing off slatted dog walks in August for absolutely no determinable reason and it really threw me for a loop (especially since we have no slatted dog walks on which to practice). She showed NO hesitation on various NADAC dog walks and it was very frustrating and puzzling for me.

Maybe Legend will have fun sticking to NADAC for a while and get over this little quirk.

Hope to see you in Springfield next year! :o) We are going to try to go. Kaiser has a long way to go in his qualifying, though. lol

Nicki said...

Well we haven't even started qualifying yet so we also have a long way to go. And we need try and get in without hoopers because we hate that so don't run it!

Karissa said...

Sharon removed Hoopers as a requirement for entry to Champs starting with this year (2012) -- so I'm guessing we won't need it for 2013, either.

I let Kaiser run it occasionally because he thinks it's fun, but otherwise I don't waste my money on that class because it doesn't count for any of our titles.

We haven't been running any games classes for a while now -- just been focusing on the "core" NATCH classes. I'll have to enter a few of those at trials eventually, I suppose.

But honestly, one of my friends took a dog to Champs this year that I don't think had a single Regular Q from the calendar period. He hasn't been doing much NADAC the last year and only felt like going because he was already going to be in Colorado for Cyno. Sharon let him in. His other dog also didn't have the qualifying points, but was the 8" Champion in 2009, so he felt he should get in on that alone. lol

Nicki said...

Oh-sweet. I both love and hate the champs requirements are a little "soft." But oh well-all for fun right?

Legend didn't quite have all the points last time and I'm almost sure Lyric won't this year.

Guess Sharon figures the checks all cash the same huh?