Rally Excellent trial

We had our first Rally Excellent trial today. We have another one a little later on tomorrow afternoon.

But neither of them are going to count toward our title =( I accidentally registered for A instead of B, but now that we have our CD title, we have to be in the B classes. And you can't do a lateral move from A to B classes, only a move up from Novice to Advanced, or Advanced to Excellent. I guess they are changing the rules in January 2010 but that doesn't do me any good now.

I wasn't too upset though, because I haven't trained with Red in a long time, since I was sick and we've been working on the house. We haven't really done any Excellent Rally training at all, so I was a little nervous about it. But since it doesn't count, the pressure was off to Qualify, so I can just treat it like a fun match.

I forgot how much easier Rally is! You can talk to the dog, lure them into position, etc. A lot more fun that strict Obedience where you can't talk to the dog and have to hold your arms in a certain position, and only use certain commands/signals.

The other good thing about being in a high level of Rally, is you know what time they start in the morning (they start with high levels and down go to Novice). So we got there 1 hour before the walkthrough was set to start.

I did the walkthrough, which was a pretty straight forward pattern, not difficult to navigate. But the judge had the "3 steps back" exercise there, which we still aren't great on yet... I wasn't worried about anything else really.

After the walkthrough, I asked someone if they could video with my camera, and she said she wasn't good and volunteered someone else to do it. I recognized him as the judge of 2 of my past rally trials. Turns out he didn't know what he was doing either, even after I explained to him how simple it is, and he forgot to push the button to record...

Anyway, we were th 4th in the ring, and I got Red out of the crate right after the walkthrough. We played some tug, then I just fed treats for focus. We went into the ring and started.

His jumps were beautiful. It was nice I could talk to him so I could remind him to sit at the halts, which he has a hard time remembering to do when we're in the ring for some reason... We messed up one sign that called for a sit, stand, then down. But he sat before he went down which I knew to be an IP, but I didn't care and didn't feel like redoing the sign so we just went ahead. The 3 steps back was actually pretty good! I wasn't sure at the time if we took enough steps back but I think we did. After we finished, there is an honor exercise which means the dog is in a sit/stay in the corner of the ring while the next team is doing their run. I never worry about Red's sit/down/stays because he hasn't had any problems in a long time. But since this one is done on-leash instead of off-leash like he's used to, I'm not sure if that threw him off or not. Right at the very end, he went down on the sit!! WTF!!! Apparently its not an NQ though, its just 10 points off.

So figuring in the 20 points we lost for the IP sign and the down on the sit/stay, we ended up with a score of 78. We we lost only 2 points on th entire rest of the course, which is great. I was still happy with how he did, though I was really disappointed about the honor station. oh well... he still got hi usual jackpot and special prize afterwards =)

Looking forward to tomorrow!