Not long to go until the WAO's

Yikes, not long to go now until the WAO's in May.  We are travelling out on Tuesday 15th May and then there are training sessions on the Wednesday and Thursday with competition three days Friday-Sunday.  Zeki is in nearly all of the events as we have recently been called to do the games classes.

I have been working on jumping courses and trying to get a better mind set when I step on the line.  I think it's coming but I'm not there yet.   We set up a good course on Tuesday night, again thanks to Greg Derret, it was a version of his masters jumping course from Easter Monday.  Once more it was different from the original because of the shape of our arena.  His course was designed to a square and we had to adapt to rectangular.  It was a good course which had plenty of handling but flowed for the dogs.

Still I didn't manage to go out and run clear first time round.  Zeki did a brilliant run but on my first attempt I lost her into the weaves # 11 instead of the tunnel #5.   I started again and she ran clear.  However, that is not going to be good enough.  I have to run a jumping course clear first time before I depart.   The course turned out to be a good training pattern as there were so many different ways of handling the weaves #11 through to tunnel #17.   We ran the course the way we thought we could run clear and fast and once we had done that then we tried different things.  Both Leah and myself found our final attempt at running the course to be our personal best attempts.  In both cases it wasn't the way we chose to run it first time.  So we took away from this not to be blinkered about how we handle certain sequences.  

Last night Leah set up a jumping course for me at her club.  It was very tricky and testing.  I was reasonably pleased with my performance in that I actually got round to #17 before going wrong.  This is further than I have been getting and it was an exceptionally tricky course.   We worked through our errors and on my final run we managed to go clear.  This is my best attempt at replicating the pattern we ran:

I am hoping to set up an extra training session at our school before the WAO in order to get some more practise in before we leave.  I am also hoping to get in two competitions before the event both with champ classes for Zeki which will be good practise plus of course I so want to win that third ticket!  We are booked at both Vyne and Beacon shows and subject to this wretched weather improving we will be there trying hard to give our best performance.

I got my tee-shirts back from Marilyn's mum who has made the most fantastic job of altering them.  They now fit me and no longer look like tent dresses!

Here is a link to the WAO magazine in which Zeki and I feature on page 54.