YKC Junior Agility Team GB Tryouts Day 1 - 02/12/2017

We had an awesome time at the first day of the YKC Junior Agility Team GB tryouts the other weekend! I'm really happy with how Ethel ran, despite her little aversion to tunnels, haha!

Little Ethel the superstar looking as sweet as ever!

Our first run was the jumping. This was a fairly challenging and tight course, and it was really fun to run! Our run was going awesomely, until I lost communication with Ethel at a german and she failed to see my change of hand, resulting in her dashing into the wrong end of the tunnel! I quickly corrected this and we carried on, and apart from another slight miscommunication at a ketchker resulting in Ethel wrapping round the wing the wrong way, which I corrected, the rest of the run was fantastic and I was really happy with it! For a young dog on a pretty challenging course, she was awesome.

Our next and final run was the agility. This was a pretty spread out and flowing course that really let Ethel and I run for it and push ourselves! I couldn't of asked for better contacts from her, they were awesome! Our hard work on them is definitely paying off, and I feel like we're finally cracking them! The run felt fantastic to me, and so speedy! We were clear up until the last couple of obstacles, where a rear cross into a tunnel unfortunately confused Ethel and she popped back out, gaining us 5 faults! I sent her back in and she successfully went through the tunnel without any issues, and I'm pleased that she completed it. She's usually fine with rear crosses into tunnels, but I think she got confused and assumed she'd gone wrong when I sent her in and then moved backwards to get to the next obstacle. I did this in order to block her from taking a jump very close to the tunnel entrance. Next time, I'd either stay on the other side and pull her away from the jump, or I'd rear cross the tunnel in the same way but run up to the tunnel exit afterwards to encourage her to continue through. Overall, I was very happy with this run!

There are lots of positives to take away from the day and plenty of things to now go away and work on in order to improve. No matter what the results, Ethel never fails to make me proud, and she's just so much fun to run! We always leave the ring buzzing!

Huge thanks to the Team GB management team and coaches for holding such an awesome day, and to the judges for setting up such fun and challenging courses! It was lovely to catch up with and support some awesome friends and watch everyone run, everyone did amazing! Every competition and event that I go to reminds me of just how grateful I am to be within the world of agility!

Now to wait and see if we gave enough to make the second day of the tryouts, fingers crossed! In the meantime, we'll go and train hard and practice the areas that we had some difficulties with on the courses so we can come back even stronger next time! See you in the next post!