Cannot wait for the Small Olympia Agility Semi-Finals!

This past weekend was another fabulous one for the OBay Shelties in agility. Zen and Hex were super on Saturday; coming home with lots of 1st place rosettes and just generally being fun to run. It was a long day as the small dogs had their first run at 9am and then their last three runs at around 5pm (all at the same time of course!) So I was glad to also have Zen to run in the medium classes as that kept us busy in between. The weather was strange; very windy and sudden bursts of heavy rain in between sunshine. Luckily the judges removed the dogwalk for the last few classes as the small dogs would have blown right off. I had decided not to run even Zen in the last agility classes until I saw they were removing the dogwalk. No class and no show is worth risking my dog getting injured. Without the dogwalk we were able to enjoy the rest of the show and our last few classes. My thanks to both judges who made that decision. It was a nice show but way too long.

But really the most exciting thing happened on Sunday at Downlands Agility Show. It was the second small KC Olympia qualifier of the year. The first qualifier was won by Hex's brother Indy back in January. There are 10 qualifiers during the year and the first and second place dogs go thru to the semi-finals. At Downland we had another Obay sheltie sweep! Hex won the class and her uncle Timmy (Zen's litter brother) came in second! This makes three OBay Shelties that will be competing at the semi-finals in the summer. Wow......could all three make it to Olympia 2007? As a breeder, I am allowed to hope and dream aren't I?

I did not get this run on video. I was waiting for Lisa to show up at the show and video us as my running order was towards the end of the class with 105 entered. But at some point, after watching about 30 dogs run, the queue was down to only a few dogs and they needed dogs. I just had the URGE to run and couldn't wait any longer! So I got Hex, warmed her up and ran! I was glad to have seen Peggy and Timmy run as they put in a super fast round. It made me realize that I had to go for it. After Hex ran I checked the times and saw that we just pushed Timmy into second place by about 4/10 of a second. Ooops....now I had to watch the rest of the class run and hope that no-one came between us or ahead of me! I would have felt bad if Timmy got pushed to third and just missed out on qualifying! A little bit of luck came into it as many of the faster dogs kept making mistakes. Whew..... and then I watched a fast little poodle go around and got a bit worried. That dog looked like it was flying. Again, a bit of luck, as she was just 1/10 second behind Timmy. Hurrah!

I have got some of our jumping runs from Sunday on video and will post later in the week.