Ow, my back hurts.

Word to the wise(r than me)…  If you know you aren’t going to get the front cross in, rear cross.

Alex and crew (Abby, Remi, moms and pops (that’s me!)) spent the weekend at our favorite agility hot spot, the crystal lake indoor soccer facility that Alex refers to as “his house”.  This weekend it was home to an AKC trial Friday – Sunday.  What better way to spend a day off than an agility trial!

Friday got us “FAST” along with standard and jumpers.  Saturday and Sunday were just standard and jumpers.

We ended the weekend with ZERO “Qs” out of 7 runs, what a pain in the ass!

For the record, we never taught Alex how to jump when we started doing agility.  It is by far our biggest mistake in his agility career.  This is one of those weekends that it came back to haunt us.  We will be moving Alex to 26″ jumps in all events moving forward and following Susan Salo’s recently released “foundation jumping” program.  I’ll report back to let you know when we start to see improvement.

Due to his lack of jumping ability I very often babysit jumps, send him extra wide, add crosses when not needed and do kinds of crazy things to give him the best chance to clear jumps.  Some times it works, most times it doesn’t.

We actually should have received a “Q” and a blue ribbon from our FAST run but the judge was very quiet and the scribe was on the other side of the ring so our weave poles were not counted.  We didn’t catch this until the next day when the trial secretary informed us that it was too late to do anything about it.  Next time we’ll have to hang around for another hour or two until scores are posted.  AKC trials often have some bureaucratic hiccup to keep you on your toes.

Regardless, we need to work on jumps and also our “two on, two off” performance.  During Alex’s standard run on Saturday he had an off course due to me pulling back from a jump too soon.  Like most off course’s this one resulted in Alex performing “bonus obsticles”, the last of which was the dog walk (for the second of three times).  When I saw him coming down the dog walk, I told him “bottom”, he ignored me.  I decided to go back to my original plan for the next two jumps (after which was a tunnel).  I had planned on front-crossing after a pair of jumps and then sending him to the tunnel.  Because he released himself from the dog walk, I had no prayer of getting the front cross in.  But, like I said, that was my plan and I wanted to stick to it… so, I did the front cross.  Alex had cleared jump number two before I was halfway done with my cross, he landed behind me and clipped the back of my knees, causing me to fall flat on my ass.

What happens when I fall on my ass on an agility course?  Alex pounces on me and licks me (oh and Whitney, my loving wife, breaks into laughter that can be heard from 75′ away.)  At least I was able to provide some entertainment to the massive crowd that often gathers around an agility course :-)

I was fine but ended up having a pretty sore back for the next couple of days, thanks to Alex and my chiropractor Dr. Carl DeStefano I am 90% better and can’t wait for next weekend’s USDAA trial in Milwaukee!

Here’s Whitney’s compilation of the weekend’s runs (yes, including the comic relief.  Steve, thanks again for the great camera work!!) …

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