Well what a weekend! i arrived home exhausted and felt like i needed a week off work to recover. I turned up at Frimley at 7pm on friday night, i got the tent and garden set up quickly then went to help Michelle and Roland with the set up which was mostly done as they had been onsite since 9am that morning. The ground look superb and probably as good as you will get. The arena was almost perfectly level and the grass was short and thick. I couldnt wait to get out there and race our dogs. On Saturday i just had the Power Paws in. It was there first time in open under our own name as we have only run in Multibreed and under the Dream Team name up till now.
I really had no clue what times we would run so submitted 23.80.... Michelle thought i was mad and put us down for 23.20 which was exactly the right thing to do as we ended up running a 22.44 in our first leg of the last race against the Terriorists and would have broken out quite a few other times on 23.80. I didnt realise till that evening that no one on the line noticed we had broken out so although we were actually awarded the win for that leg we shouldn't have been given it. We ended up winning 4 out of 5 races just being beaten by the Terriorists who we couldn't match on speed without breaking out. This put us into 2nd and bettered our time from Wimbledon by 1 second.
We had our usual team of Barney, Poppy, Ben and Campbell running with Maddie as reserve. I also decided a few days before to give Alfie a go as he has been doing so well in training. I felt we would never get a better chance to test him than running against the Terriorists as they know staffies and would be happy to grab him if he ran into their runback area... and probably forgive him if he ran out into there lane! I went and spoke to them before to make sure they were happy for us to run him and they were lovely and said im worrying too much and just to get on and run him. Well that told me! We did run backs with him in a few of the races before and he was so focused so i started to get quite excited. I decided to run Barney, Poppy, Maddie (as she was fresh not having raced all day) and Alfie in the final race. The did a fantastic first leg and got our best time of the day. In the second leg maddie slowed right down and we lost that leg. In the third leg she lay down at the box and just refused to move so i had to pull her and run Ben who by now was quite tired. They managed to pull things back and win the third leg with out second best time of the day. So now it was 2 all and getting quite exciting! Sadly the Terriorists just found that extra bit of speed and beat us on the fifth leg by 0.01 seconds. They were lovely though and came over and gave me a hug and said how well Alfie had done.
On Sunday it was just Cai running. We were in Division 1 as usual. For once i was looking forward to it as we were set to race the Jolly Jumpers who had come over from Belgium. They are the current European record holders and their dogs all have lovely box turns and their changes are just to die for. They were so friendly and i spent quite a bit of time chatting to them about training and managed to get quite a few tips. Lots of them were things i was already doing with our new dogs so feel like we are heading in the right direction. They came to watch Cai run and thought he looked good but feel i can get more out of him so im going to work on some of the things they suggested. They felt i could get 0.2 - 0.3 off his times with work so that would take him down to 3.7 & 3.8's which ive always felt he had in him. Ill just have to wait and see now!
In the first race of the day we managed to pull off a 17.64 which is our best time this year. Unfortunatly for us there was a problem with the lights and they made us re run the whole race so we lost the time and didnt manage anything quite as good all day. We ended up 4th with a best time of 17.77 seconds.
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