Better late then never!

At last, with my Dad's expert help, I have managed to download the video of Pebbles doing her Olympia Semi-Final agility round that she did in September last year.

If you know Pebbles and have seen her run you will see that although she does a lovely clear round she is not firing on all cylinders. She is hesitant going onto the A-Frame and not going as fast as she normally does over the course in general. You can see this by the fact that I am only jogging and still ahead of her.

I have thought about what the cause of this might be and have come up with the following:

1. In August she competed in the KC Agility Festival and half way up the A-Frame she fell backwards down to the bottom. For the rest of her rounds that day she refused to go up the A-Frame until the last attempt when it took 3 attempts to get her to go up very slowly. Since then she has been getting more confident but she still remembers the fall and hesitates.

2. Again at the KC Agility Festival Pebbles was doing an agility round in the main ring with a crowd and a man on a tannoy commentating on the round. During this round she jumped a spread jump and landed right on top of it rolling to the ground. This gave her a real scare and she went to the side of the ring and didn't want to continue. After trying to coax her to keep going I had to eventually carry her out of the ring. Again this shook her confidence - all in the same day! Afterwards in the car on the way home she just slept on my Mum's lap for about 4 hours - I think she was in shock as well as exhausted. But she had given her all. I think what happened at the Olympia Semis was that on hearing the man on the tannoy it reminded her of her fall and she immediately became hesitant about the whole thing. So despite trying her best and doing a lovely clear round she was just not fast enough on the day.

I am still so proud of her for even getting as far as the semi-finals and to go and do a clear round was brilliant. It is all good experience for the future if she should ever qualify again. She managed to finish 13th out of 30 dogs which is amazing for her first full year of agility. What a star!

The first 10 dogs qualified for Olympia in December. However, one woman had 2 dogs in the top 10 and she is only allowed to compete with one so this meant that 11th place qualified too. Then in November tragically the lovely, talented tri-colour Obay sheltie, Zen, who had qualified in the top 10 died from mushroom poisoning. And so this meant 12th place was called in to run. So all in all Pebbles was only 1 place away from running at Olympia!!!

So here is the video for viewing: