The show season begins!

This was a weekend of Rally Obedience as I entered Lance in the shows at Lake Elmo. This is an absolutely HUGE show as there is conformation, obedience, rally, and agility going on at the fair grounds. It's also the first time Lance has been here since last year he hadn't even started showing yet :P I entered Lance in Rally Advanced B

Day 1: There was lots of anticipation today. The show was running about 2hrs late, yay. But finally it is our turn to go and a feeling of dread hits me. Lance is staring into the ring and does not have the greatest attention on ME! But we make it through the course ok. His attention wasn't the greatest, but we managed to do all of the exercises without too much of a problem. At least Lance stayed in a decent heel position even though his focus wasn't 100% on me. I thought for sure our score would be much lower, but Lance qualified with a 94 and placed 4th!

Day 2: The show was right on time today and Lance was more than ready! He had great attention going into the ring and I only lost him for about 2 seconds in the opening stations! There were even 3 pivotish stations (halt-uturn, halt-pivot right-halt, and halt-180 right-halt) to test his skills and Lance aced them! I, however, did not. Since that last pivot sign was right after a jump I had to hurriedly collect my dog before running into the gate and was not directly in the front of the sign. I didn't even think about as I halted-180 LEFT- halt! And since it was a complete 180 I was still facing the correct direction and didn't even notice my mistake until after I finished at the judge had to tell me. So silly handler cost Lance 10 points! No thanks to me, we qualified with a 88, with Lance really earning a 98! This has earned Lance his Rally Advanced title and Sunday we will move up!

Day 3: Since he earned his Advanced title yesterday we moved up to the Excellent B class. I felt a little thud when I saw the "back up 3 steps in heel" sign. I had made a bet with Adam last night that this sign would show up on Lance's 1st Excellent show, and sure enough I won. Like most dogs, Lance sees this move being very hard so I do most of his practice along a wall to prevent his little butt from swinging out.

Well Lance's turn came and he had pretty good attention. Except for a little crooked sits here and there Lance did every sign nicely, including the back up in heel! His moving down, walk around was also extremely fast, especially considering it was right after a jump. It was practically land in a little bit of a run and then hit the deck! When we finished Lance was very confused as to why we weren't leaving the ring. This is our first time doing the honor (a stay, sit-stay in today's case, while the next dog does the course) and Lance wasn't sure what was going on. He had a huge grin on his face as sat and scanned the crowd! And we qualified with a 97 and placed 1st! Lance won some buffalo jerky for his performance today :)

Don't mess with the corgi!