Doncaster Flyball Again!

Well i really must be mad as we decided to make the trip north again to Doncaster for more flyball. The racing was held indoors in a riding school with turf laid down on the racing lanes and runback. Not seen this before and i have to say i was impressed with how good it looked and the ammount of work that must have gone into laying it before hand, although it had all got very muddy by the time division 1 started. Today i was not just running Cai but Campbell was making his open debut too. I hadn't been that bothered about running him before now as hes very slow compaired to Cai and not really that bothered about the ball. I think he just does it because i ask him nicely. Well he was a little star and actually rather enjoyed himself! I think he may have even run under 5 seconds once during the day. He ran in 3rd position and crossed in nicely and came back out without even looking at the other dogs which has been a problem in the past. Unfortunatly other dogs in the team let us down so although he completed all but 2 leg he has not ended up with many points but i know he can do it now so look forward to his next show.

Cai's team ran well but we were down Breeze one of our key dogs as she had started fitting foillowing the show the week before so got no where near our seed time and got smashed in all the first halfs races. We clawed our way back in the afternoon and ended up 3rd (there were 7 teams in our division) Counting up the points it looks like they have ended up with around 600 each as we took many races to 5 legs! All in all a good day... although i got up at 3.30am sunday morining and didnt get back to 1.30am that night! 22 hours awake for flyball.... not sure id do it again. Oh hang on we are going back in March! i think we are offically mad.

Doncaster Flyball

The first show of year for us and what a way to go! We got up at 3.30am to make it to Doncaster for 8am. We actually did it in far less time than i thought and arrived at 7.30am so had lots of time to spend with the dogs before our busy day started. I was only racing Cai today so didn't have too much to think about. He was fantastic even though he is really not fit at the moment and hasn't done much training over the winter.

It was his second time on matting and he was running around 4.2 seconds so nowhere near what he can do when fit but he was consistent so i cant complain. I just couldn't get the lights right all day though and ended up being 0.1 second late every time which is not much but its annoying when you are consistently getting it wrong by the same amount but cant seem to get it right! Cai is really better running from 50 foot but these lights only allowed us to go from 40 foot so maybe that's why we struggled. We were seeded 1st in div 1 on a time that was really a bit too fast for us but even though we didn't come close to our submitted time we still won every race to finish 1st with a best time of 18.44 seconds.

He finally got his Flyball Dog Intermediate award certificate too which i was very pleased with. My only goal for 2009 with him was to get him running in open, i never thought he would finish on well over 1000 points. We are back off to Doncaster next week lets hope we do as well.