Now let’s go back to the start… Start line stays that is.

When we started out in agility I had a pretty decent start line stay. Then late last year I decided I didn’t like the idea of waiting and so starts became chaos. Mum would hold my collar as she removed my lead and handed it to the steward. Then mum would say ‘stay’ but the moment she let go of my collar I would bolt.

So mum has been mulling over what to do about this for a while. She has chatted about it with lots of people and everyone seems to have an opinion on what to do… from “Oh well that is life”, to “try a sling shot start” to “if he breaks walk off the course”. Watch the blog as there is an upcoming Training Tip Tuesday on what we have learnt from all this.

Well mum had decided she was going to play hardball at the trial we were attending today… yep… if I broke the stay we were walking.

Mum isn’t mean. We have been putting a lot of effort into this whole “wait” thing over recent weeks. We had also changed our start line routine. Mum was absolutely doing all she could to set me up for success…. and you know what…. It worked. Yep… a perfect day with 5 runs and 5 start line stays.

The runs themselves were all pretty good too.

1st up in RQH Agility I think mum was more focused on the start stay that she didn’t really have the course in the head. Ordinary handling from mum but we had a great run.

The Open Jumping. Yet again I did the hard stuff (i.e. the distance challenge… I’m getting pretty good at this) and messed up a couple of the easy bits.. but importantly held my start line stay.

Then we had 3 JDX runs. All 3 had little challenges but we enjoyed them all.

The 1st Run had some wraps and interesting lines which gave us the opportunity to use some of the European and One Mind Dogs handling we have been practicing. Mum tried a lap turn at the 2nd jump (thanks to a wonderful start line stay I might add). Well we tried but mum wasn’t quite in the right position and didn’t quite cue it right but we tried. Also helps if mum walks the course correctly and gives me the direction to do ALL the jumps… after a lovely wrap at 14 mum completely missed 15… but gheezzz I did a nice tight turn. DQ unfortunately but lots of great stuff.

The 2nd & 3rd Runs ended up running in parallel. Mum had to walk both and remember both. She did ok. In both runs we had 2 bar drops (well 3 if you include me taking out both bars of the spread in my 3rd Run) but otherwise really nice runs…. and partly because mum wasn’t frantically trying to catch up with me after I broke the start… yep lovely start line stays.

I haven’t seen mum so excited since we got our JD title. She walked around all day with a smile on her face and I got LOTS and LOTS of pats all day.

So here is a video of our 3 JDX runs if you want to check them out…. and loving the saying we have adopted… “it doesn’t need to be perfect to be great”.

Another big day of agility runs but can’t wait for the next one.

Bode