For those of us that enjoy the competitive aspect, running agility is all about running clear as fast as possible.

I remember my trialing journey with my first agility dogs Juno and Kai. They didn't have any agility foundations so I had to repair a lot along the way. Contacts, weaves and jumping performance left a lot to be desired.

With San, I wanted to reduce the chance of getting faulted for these obstacles as much as possible. It's not realistic to assume you'll run 100% clear — but with a great understanding of independent obstacle performance, I figured I should be able to drastically increase my chances.

And with great success! San's had very reliable contacts — running dog walk, running A-frame and a stopped seesaw. His understanding of independent weave entries and exits is very good. And he's generally a very clean jumper.

Of course, dogs are brilliant at picking up patterns and continue to learn their entire life — it is no different when we run agility trials. Our dogs know we will release them faster in a trial, and that we may not re-do an obstacle if criteria weren't quite met. They will start to anticipate this and start releasing themselves. We can grumble all we want, but if we continue running the course, then the dog gets to continue to do agility, so what we've really done is reinforce the dog for leaving early!

I was aware that this was happening with San's seesaw. He was no longer waiting for my release, but he did wait for the seesaw to hit the ground, so I wasn't too bothered. In his early career, he used to lose a lot of time on the seesaw, being a good boy waiting for my release, so again, I wasn't too bothered.

Until we learned a hard lesson at this year's European Open tryouts...

This seesaw fault has probably cost us a placement for the EO 2024. It was our first seesaw fault ever, so yes, that did sting.

And I know it was a close call. Personally I don't really care at this point whether the call was correct or not. The judge has to do this in the blink of an eye and honestly, they shouldn't have to be in this position where it's a close call — it's my job to make it as obvious as possible to the judge that my dog hits his contacts!

So after a bit of grumbling and feeling sorry for myself 😉 I have learned that I need a more reliable seesaw! So I have just started to re-train it! My plan is to have two cues: one for his current trial behaviour (a running seesaw) and one where he has to stop and wait for my release. To be continued!

Fast forward a week later to the Easter trial...

A week later, we had a "Finals" competition. It's a special kind of trial for the A3 combinations here in the Netherlands. The combination winning the Finals round on that day is awarded with a ticket for the Dutch Championships Finals in June.

It was our first outdoor trial of the year, on wet grass, so I didn't have high hopes, but we managed to qualify to run the Finals round by a hair. This meant we had to start as the first of the finalists. I didn't find the round too difficult, other than maybe the dogwalk -> open weave entry with the finish jump right next to it.

We ran a beautiful tight round and I was overjoyed, thinking we were clear, only to realise as we finished that we'd received a fault. Apparently San had been given a dog walk fault. Which shocked me, because he's so incredibly reliable on his dog walk! It turns out that he had lost his balance on the dog walk (a lot of dogs had issues with the dog walk in this round). People that were watching on that side of the ring, told me that San had actually still tried so hard to hit the contact with his left rear leg, whilst tumbling. His understanding of the criteria is insane! On close inspection of the video, I think I see what they mean. But despite his best effort, he'd still (understandably) gotten the fault.

I was gutted. San was always so reliable with his contacts, and yet we'd received contact faults 2 weekends in a row! 😥 On trials that mattered!

Only this time, during the Easter trial Finals... no one else ran clear!

So we won the Finals and with that, the ticket for the Dutch Championships Finals! 🥳

This was definitely a week of highs and lows... with two unusual contact faults, one which cost me a lot, and another where we fortunately got lucky!

Sometimes we win, sometimes we learn!