Reaching That Milestone

Six months...we've reached six months post knee surgery and Holly looks fantastic :) So fantastic that our chiro/acu vet didn't think she needed to be seen again for 2-3 months...in fact she called her my "perfect dog". Okay, so she was pandering to me...whatever, I'll take it!

And...wait for it...I'm letting her do agility.

While training Danee, I've let Holly do some agility in the yard and she's been looking great. We had my one and only "local" agility trial ("local" as in the closest at 2 hrs away) last weekend, so I loaded up the girls and we went for a few hours. I volunteered, caught up with a few people I haven't seen in months, socialized Danee (who did super awesome at handling her first trial atmosphere), and I let Holly run in 3 classes...Regular, Tunnelers and Hoopers.

Chilling out at the agility trial

For those not familiar with agility lingo...or for that matter, NADAC agility lingo...Regular is a class in which courses are made up of all obstacles...weaves, A-frame, jumps, hoops, tunnels, and dog walk. You have to run them in order and you dog must perform them without faults in order to earn a qualifying run...aka, a "Q". Tunnelers is a course made up of all open tube-like tunnels. It's what we call a "games" class and it's lots of fun to run. Hoopers is another games class. It's a handling challenge and is a course made up of all hoops that dogs simply flat run through. Sounds boring right? Yeah, I think so too...but Holly seems to like it.

Even though Holly is an Elite dog (there are 3 levels: Novice, Open and Elite), I ran her in a Novice Regular class because Novice only has 6 weave poles in it. I'm not totally convinced that weaving doesn't bother her back, so I didn't want our first run to test that by asking her to do 12 weaves. She ran in Elite Tunnelers which only means she needs to run faster than the lower levels to "Q". And she ran in Open Hoopers since she didn't have all the qualifying runs she needed to run in Elite...she does now though!

Here are our 3 runs, full of mistakes and all. After 6 agonizing months, I'm just super thrilled that she's able to play agility at any level at all. Life is too short to care about how well we did or didn't do. She had fun, I had fun and that's all I care about :)

Enjoy!

Our next agility trial won't be until October...hopefully Danee will make her agility debut, Holly will be fitter than fit and my handling won't be so rusty by then.