Poodle Championships in Tampere and Wii´s debut
Last saturday the alarm clock rang early in the morning, or should we say in the middle of the night. At 4 o´clock I and all the dogs hit the road towards Tampere. It was time for Wii’s debut and Poodle Championships. In training Wii has done really well lately, but of course we started to have problems with the dog walk about 2 weeks before the competitions. The last week we had good repetitions and in the two last trainings 100 % hits on the dog walk. Did I tell you that I have been training running contacts with Wii?
The agility track looked ok and I actually had no other “fears” than the dogwalk, but was of course hoping for the best after some good training sessions. Wii did a really nice and fast race, but anyhow Wii got 5 faults on the dogwalk. From the video below I can see that she looks at me just before the contact. We really need to train with more distraction. I think the biggest problem is when I´m starting to “show” where we are going next is the problem, she can stand my running quite well. Wii was actually -21 seconds under the ideal time and the fastest dog in the whole class (13 seconds faster than the winner in mini 1).
The jump race also felt good, but I pushed her too much in the entrance to the weave poles and she missed it. I also didn´t see that she missed the last weave pole and was disqualified. Now we somehow know the status and know what to train more. I´m satisfied with Wii´s debut. She is so fun to train and compete with! 🙂
We had a long day of waiting, but in the afternoon it was time for the older dogs in class 3. Alva entertained the audience this day and did what she likes – tunnels! 🙂 Both Hasty and Gilja ran clean on the agility course. Gilja´s race was not that fast, since she was checking out the judge on all contacts. On the jump race I think all the dogs and myself were too tired. Gilja took down a bar, which she usually does´t. Alva was disqualified as well as Hasty. Hasty´s race was actually very good, but on the final straight one hurdle was jumped the wrong way.
Here are the results from the Poodle Championships 2012. Hasty was 6th, Gilja 11th and Wii 19th. From the time you can see that Wii would have won the whole Championships without the fault from the dogwalk. :/
Videos of Wii by Timo Teileri. Thank you!