Agility Trial #1, Day 1

When I left the standard ring, the first thing I heard was “That dog is going to be AWESOME.”
Everything was going dandy. I gave Auggie to my mom to have him measured by the judge while I walked the standard course. Then I walked JWW. After that, Mom came out looking kind of sour. “I guess I don’t know the ‘trick’ to make him shorter,” she says. “He’s 15.”
Auggie’s breeder, J, and I stare at each other blankly for a minute. My dog is not fifteen inches at the withers.  He is 13 and a half!  “Wait… what?” I said.
There was much flabbergasting back and forth, and finally the judge appears and confirms that yes, my dog has to run at the 16 inch jump height. Again, J and I stare at each other. I go to the practice jump to make sure he can handle it, and he does okay.  J helps me out and tells me what to change up now that he’s running at a much higher jump height than we’ve EVER done before.

Okay.  No big deal.  It’s fine.  It’s fine.  I’m not freaking out.
I just think I’m going to puke.
Everywhere.

So we run standard. It’s going REALLY really well. He gets on the table, I put him in a down, and he holds there. Then I call him off and to the teeter – and suddenly I’m still standing by the table and he’s already on the teeter!  I remember thinking I was going to throw up all over that teeter, panicking, thinking he was going to take off that teeter and start creating his own course.  I caught up with him, but not in time – he hopped off the end of the teeter before it even hit the ground. Automatically eliminated from qualifying at that point. I fumbled a bit after that and missed getting him into the tunnel, which would have been -5 points but would still have had us qualify.
It was just my bad, letting him get away from me on that teeter, that screwed us out of a Q.

REGARDLESS… it was beautiful. It was awesome. It was wonderful. I came out of the ring and wanted to cry, I was so proud and so happy.
My Auggie did it.  I couldn’t stop telling him what a good boy he was, I was just SO DAMN PROUD.

For Jumpers with Weaves… it was great for a first run!  It was a clean run, no off courses, no touched bars, he did the weaves wonderfully!

I don’t have video for my standard run, but I do have it for JWW. (No sound because the wind was awful!)

Our JWW time was 37.79 seconds, and… FIRST place, and a Q.

It was amazing. Afterwards, everybody kept congratulating me and going “Did I hear right that this is your first run?? You did SO WELL!!”
I didn’t do anything.  Auggie did it all.
That’s my Awesome Auggie.

….and now we have to do it all over again tomorrow!