Burnham 2009

Once we had found the venue (our sat nav took us the scenic route which was a bit scary as some of it was down single track lanes!) we got settled in. The venue is lovely, it's so nice to be camped somewhere without road noise! The exercise area was OK but had previously been used by stock so the ground was very rutted and also full of cow pats for the dogs to munch on! The ground was very dry and in the camping area you had to be careful as there were big cracks that could easily cause damage if you put your foot down or indeed a dog did the same. Luckily the area where the rings were set up was much better.

We really enjoyed the show, it was very relaxed but well organised and the courses were all great. One of Zeki's courses had quite an angle to the A-Frame and a combination after but she coped really well.

I was so pleased with Zeki at the show. She took everything in her stride although she was a little less confident than normal. I noticed this immediately as she didn't bark on set up and sat on the start line almost as if she couldn't believe she was actually going to be allowed to do agility! Possibly that's because I've done a lot of queuing with her (for Andy and Kizzy) and she has got used to this but then it hasn't come to anything.

Most of the things that went wrong were my fault in that my timing was poor. I didn't allow for the fact that she wasn't quite as confident as in training and I kept pulling her past jumps that were set slightly on a corner. In training she takes these in her stride but here she was pretty determined to stick with me (ah, that's so sweet!) In one round she ran under a jump which is very unusual for her but when we looked at the line we realised that she was focused on me as I did a very long lead out and the jump pole from her sight line was merged into the long jump. In another she popped out of the weaves but I just kept going as I want her to have fun and build speed.

My biggest disappointment is of course the dog walk which I kind of knew would be the case. It's not Zeki at all, it's my training. I have messed about with it so much that the poor dog hasn't really got much clue what I want. For now we'll just have to keep going with what we've got as I want her to have as much ring experience as possible. However it is my priority to get this right in training.

I also need to practise snakes and keeping my shoulders straight. You'll see in one of the little video clips how I pull her straight across the first jump of a snake sequence. Bad handler!

All of the above said I absolutely loved running her and had the best time. She was fab. I was so pleased with our pairs result. I think I tried much harder in that as we were part of a pairs team and I didn't want to let Kizzy (or Andy) down. Sadly I forgot to ask anyone to film that round so our one successful round remains only in my mind!

I was pleased that I managed to run Niamh well even though my mind was focused mainly on Zeki. We got a 2nd and a 5th place on the Saturday. I was really pleased with the 2nd as it was in agility and I made sure we had solid contacts as I've been pushing them so much lately to get that final win into Grade 7. On Sunday she had two lovely rounds with a spectacular layer that was so good we actually completely missed out a jump that I forgot we should take and a really good round with a winning time but the last but one jump down. So all in all more than happy with the NN's performance.

Kizzy worked brilliantly on the Sunday and got 6th in a jumping class. She flew round her agility class but just missed her dog walk. Andy has much work to do over the winter with her contacts. Right now he isn't doing any correcting at all as he just wants to build her speed and confidence. She was much happier on the Sunday when it was cooler, Saturday was really hot and although she ran well she definitely prefers the cooler air as we saw by her performance on Sunday.

Here is my video of Zeki's first KC show and also a couple of NN's runs.