Agility At Spruce Meadows

This weekend we had the pleasure of playing agility at the world famous equestrian centre Spruce Meadows. The Alberta Kennel Club held it's annual summer show at Spruce Meadows for the first time this year. It is such a beautiful venue -everything is so pristine. There are even people in big golf carts who come by to drive you, your dog and all of your gear to and from the parking lot. Very fancy!

Here is Bosley posing next to one of the horse exercise paddocks. There were horses in it earlier in the day, but they were gone by the time I got out my camera to take pictures.

In addition to the thrill of competing at Spruce Meadows, Bosley had a really good weekend. He only had one run that was a bit pokey, but the rest were great. One of his standard runs was 13 seconds under time, which is huge for Bosley. His weaves were really good - he is finally getting used to the 24" spacing. He did miss 3 weave entries today - one because he was distracted by something outside the ring and the other two I thought he got, but he missed at the last second. More weave entry work coming up for Bosley. He responded nice to my handling and even did a beautiful serpentine today. He had some really nice runs, and besides the couple of flubbed weave entries, I was super happy with his performance all weekend.

We came away from the weekend with 3 Qs - 2 Standard and 1 JWW. (We should have had another standard Q, but for some weird reason Bosley stopped to sniff the table before he jumped on, so we had a refusal.) So in 2 weekends, Bosley has earned 6 Excellent B 'Q's. I am pretty amazed with that actually. Now I really want to do more CKC agility - but there are no more trials nearby until next summer. Bummer.

Here is Bosley outside the agility rings. Look at that beautiful grass we got to run on. It was perfect - no lumps or bumps and no gopher holes! I can't wait to go back next year.

The funniest part of the weekend was the huge crowds that would come and watch. We are not used to this in agility. Everyone would cheer when the dogs did something good and they would "awwww" when a dog would knock a bar. They would laugh when handlers messed up. Bosley got lots of cheers for his weaving - I don't think people expect a big dog to be able to weave like he does. The spectators really enjoyed watching and it is fun to see the reactions of people who are not involved in the sport. As competitors, we get so focused on watching the handler errors and the technical side of the sport, that sometimes we forget to watch just for the fun of it.