My Two Frankies

Frankie - my multiple personality puppy. Wow!

On Saturday at the agility trial in Prescott, he was amazing! Four completely awesome runs and one kinda crappy one. He started the day with a Q in gamblers. He started out a little wild, but was able to control himself and pay attention by the time he had to do the gamble (which for you non-agility folks is a set of obstacles that you have to direct your dog through at a distance. There is a line you can't cross while you command the dog). He's never all that great with distance, but he was awesome on Saturday! After that, he Q'd in both of his standard runs and thus finally achieved all the Q's he needed to advance to Intern level. Yay! It only took us 3 years!

Here is a video of one of his Standard Q's. He still is reluctant about the weave poles, but since he did everything else I asked of him and most impressively, didn't run off like a spazz, I didn't mind so much. And we were still 9 seconds under time, even with all the time he wastes there.


He competed in his first Specialist level jumpers course. The 4-5-6 jumps were the hardest and he breezed right through with no trouble, so I was mentally already picking up my ribbons. Stupid. I was lazy on the end of the course and he missed the last serpentine. If I had more focus (gee, wonder where he gets his issues from??), we would have Q'd in jumpers too. After he went off-course, I got him right back and we finished well. Bummer. The last run of the day was Snakes and Ladders, which requires 3 sets of weave poles. Based on the video above, you can probably guess that we were WAY over time. :)

Then, on Sunday, the old Frankie was back...larger than life. He had the zoomies worse than he has ever had. We pissed off our trigility partner because she didn't Q. (Lady-Pat had to miss the trial because she had surgery so a random person was added to our group. Never a good thing with a dog like Frankie!). His second trigility run was the exact same. How embarrassing. I thought he was settled down during his Standard run. He stayed at the start line. He took the first 2 jumps, he entered the correct end of the tunnel and most shockingly he went right into the weaves and was doing great. I was thrilled! Until he hit the 6th of the 12 weaves. His eyes glazed over and he was gone. He zoomed around the edge of the ring faster than a greyhound. He's insane. Ergh. He actually did great in his Jumpers run - it seems that with no tunnels or contacts to entice him, he doesn't have the strong urge to spazz. Again though, he missed a serpentine. Looks like I know what to work on.

The last run of the day was Strategic Time Gamblers - where you make up your own course for 30 seconds, then make up your own course for another 15 seconds...with the goal of trying to rack up lots of points and finish the run in 42.5 to 45 seconds. Frankie obviously loves to make up his own course and I was a good judge of time, so we did get a Q in this one. I don't technically count it as a good run, though, since my dog was not under control at any point in the 44 seconds! So, Sunday sucked.

But overall, I'm pleased with the weekend. The Frankie that showed up on Saturday was so enjoyable that I was able to overlook the goofball Frankie that came to play on Sunday. I guess we'll stick with it!