Less than a week before we travel to Belgium!

I am both excited and nervous in equal quantities about the trip to Belgium and taking part in the WAO's.   We have trained on courses for a month now and so there isn't any more training to do.  Now it's about mental preparation and focusing on the task in hand.

We got together with a few friends on Saturday and trained over another course by the Danish judge Thomas Ammitzboll.  It was another good test.  After we had worked on that course, we removed the contact equipment and Leah added a couple of jumps, re-numbered and voila, we had a very difficult jumping course to work on.    Both courses proved really testing and highlighted areas to work on for future but importantly areas to be 'managed' for the WAO. Here are the two courses that we worked on.

I didn't run Niamh at all on Saturday so that I could concentrate on Zeki.  This proved worthwhile and thank you to Tracy for running Naughty Niamh who had a lovely time.  Here she is between runs looking cheeky and cute! I love her so much and it was great to see her running so well with someone else.  She looks gorgeous :o)

On Tuesday back at training we set up one more of Thomas's courses.  This time a straight jumping course.  When we had laid it out we were muttering that it was much easier than the courses we had worked on previously but then we thought perhaps we should run it before thinking like that.  This proved to be true as the course was subtly more difficult than it looks.  It was though, a little simpler than some of the stuff we have been working on and I think this was a good thing because although testing it proved to be confidence-building as it was just that little more achievable.  A really good course to train on.   After we had run it three times, Andy partially re-numbered and we worked on a second pattern.   This second pattern was a little trickier but I was really pleased to run it clear first time!  Yay at last I have run clear on a jumping course first hit!   Normally I run Niamh in the first class but this week I swapped Zeki into Niamh's class so that I had to hit the course untried with Zeki.  I'm really glad I did this as it is much more realistic.  I worked out by the end of the evening that I had run ten full courses (1-20) with my two dogs plus a half hour  puppy class with Tidey.  No wonder I slept well!

Here are the courses:

I have one more training session with Zeki before the WAO which is tonight at Leah's.  I hope I can keep running well with her.   I went to Vyne show on Monday purely to try to get some good runs under my belt but the weather wasn't nice and I found the ground very slippery.  This wasn't helped by the fact that I didn't have decent footwear for the conditions.  I have such trouble finding shoes that fit comfortably and tend to stick with my Salomons whatever the conditions.  As a result I was absolutely rubbish with both my dogs.

So, I have bought some new Salomon shoes and I think I will feel much more confident in wet conditions.   I am going to drag myself out of bed in the early hours on Saturday and go to Beacon show where I will run Zeki in a competition with PMA (positive mental attitude!)

I have lots of other things to blog about and will try to do this (to clear my mind) before we set off to the WAO's so watch this space!