Back-to-back double Q's

This weekend we were in Castle Rock for a three-day AKC trial.
Friday Sage qualified in Standard and again in Jumpers with a fourth place and a double Q!

On Saturday she qualified in Standard with a third place and in Jumpers (I forget her placement) for another double Q! That puts her at 13 QQ's towards her MACH title.

On Sunday, we had Jumpers first and she had a lovely run but dropped the first bar. So since a double Q was not on the line (and she certainly does not need any more speed points), I decided to use our standard run for training and proofing. I left her in the weaves and moved away laterally towards the next obstacle. Oops, she popped out of the weaves. The next to proof was her running a-frame contact. I ran ahead of her to the a-frame and instead of managing the downside, I moved away laterally (because of the wrong-course jump directly in front of the a-frame) to cue the correct jump just to the left. She ran through the contact, turned left, and took the correct jump. I was very pleased to see that. So no Q's on Sunday but the Standard run gave me some excellent feedback.

Mr. Summit had an amazing two days on Friday and Saturday! This is the first trial that he has been in Excellent B in both classes (he moved up from Ex. A Jumpers from the last trial). Friday's Standard run was very nice - smooth, he collected nicely for tight turns, I left him on the table for a nice lead out. I did overhandle a section of the course by bringing up my outside arm to get his attention and of course, he saw that as a cue to come in and threadled the jumps for a wrong course. I didn't do that with Sage - not sure why I felt the need to use my offside arm with Summit.

That afternoon he qualified in Jumpers for first place and his first Q in Ex. B Jumpers. I felt that I was late with several turning cues and so he had some wide turns on a couple areas on the course.

On Saturday, he qualified in Standard with a Second place and a VERY nice run. Then that afternoon he had a beautiful Jumpers run but dropped a bar on the double. That would have been a double Q. Too funny, at this stage, QQ's are not my goal with my young dog so I thought it was pretty fantastic that he came so close to getting one.

On Sunday though, my young dog had lost his mind. He had a crazy Jumpers run that included three dropped bars, one wrong course, and NO collection. At one point towards the end of the run, I recalled him to my side for a sit and gave him a few moments to settle down and let his eyes stop spinning, then we finished the last four jumps. I guess if I could say one good thing about that run was after a very wide turn (again not reading my collection cue), he was completely out of position to get the weavepole entry. Nope, he actually turned back slightly and collected and got the entry. Pretty impressive.

His Standard run that afternoon was better. He actually had a very nice run about 3/4 of the way through until he dropped the panel, I was too far behind to cue the rear cross at the chute so he came out of the chute turning in the wrong direction (a lot of dogs did this), then missed the jump because of the spin. So a wrong course. Then he dropped the bars on the triple at the finish. I'm not too happy with the bar-dropping.

Our training goals for the next couple weeks:
Summit - we'll be doing a lot of RTH drills working on collection and revisiting jumping basics. I'll balance that with the zig zag drill to work on keeping the bars up while in extension.

Sage - hmmm.... I'll think of something fun. But she's pretty darn perfect:-)

It was a great weekend and fun to see both my dogs in the top 4 placements in several of the same classes.

I'll post some videos when I get them.