I do give him a bit of a break since it was so very hot this weekend, after the very cool summer we've had it was hard on both of us.
On Saturday we had 2 rally trials, 2 runs in RL2 and 2 in RL3. At this point I'd like to say that I do not like it when we have to do the easier run before the harder one. I don't think we've ever done Advanced before Excellent in AKC, and it's definitely demotivating for the dog. We qualified in all 4 runs (3rd in L2/trial 1, 1st as only qualifying team in L3/trial 1 and 2nd place in both L2 and 3 in trial 2), with mediocre scores and earned no championship points but at least placement ribbons.
On Sunday we did Open A first thing in the morning. Like the last few times there were some good things and some bad and we didn't qualify, but we were oooooh so close. So close that it may be worth entering more trials. I recently looked at results from about 200 AKC obedience trial days of the last 2 years within reasonable driving distance from me and found that any given dog only has a 30% chance of qualifying in any given trial, so I just need to be patient.
But I digress - Quigley's Heel Free and Figure 8 (which he normally loves especially!) were so atrocious, that alone NQ'd us. Oddly enough, his drop on recall, both retrieves and the broad jump were very nice, with only two 1/2 point deductions total on the 3 exercises.
We got dinged for another 2 points after he needed a second command on the out of sight honor down, but the huge deal was that he actually held his 3-minute out of sight sit, even though it was so very hot and the dogs to either side of him went down. There were 4 dogs in Open A and one in Open B, all of them did the group sit together, and the only dog who would have qualified otherwise didn't hold his sit.
Rally was a total disaster, I guess Quigley was simply done with things after obedience and didn't want to play anymore.
He heeled along well enough (why oh why not in obedience???), but refused pretty much every single stationary exercise. I made him do the L2 course as well as I could manage even after it was clear we NQ'd, but excused us about a third of the way through our L3 run because it would have been totally unfair if the honor dog NQ'd just because we took so long. How's that for good sportsmanship? Our last UKC trial for 2010 is coming up this weekend in Claremont. I entered both at the same time, so we'll have another chance at Open A in addition to 2 rally runs each day. The weather forecast says highs in the low 90s again. Oh joy.
