Outdoor NADAC Trial

I hate Minnesota weather.  It reached 92 degrees at the trial on Friday and then was 52 degrees of cold rain on Sunday.

Lance
The corgi gave me the finger on our first course of the weekend, weavers.  It was VERY hot out and Lance said he could not find his weave entrance nor stay in them.  On the positive side, our touch n go run went better since he was slower on the contacts and didn't leap from as high ;)

On Saturday it wasn't nearly as hot and Lance had 3 runs: regular, touch n go, and chances.  Regular was a disaster as he again didn't to weave and this time didn't respond at all to my attempt at managing his contacts.  Touch no Go I lost my mind and ended up just making up the entire course as I went and Lance plodded along.  Chances was AMAZING!!  We are now in elite and I felt the course was way beyond our training level.  Lance proved me wrong by effortlessly doing the distance, even the dogwalk at a distance(!).  Unfortunately he knocked a bar :(  I didn't get any video of the run since I thought for sure we wouldn't be qualifying. I don't have a map of the elite course, but here is the open line and the elite line was a few feet behind the number 5 jump and then angled down to the tunnel exit.

Sunday we were only entered in 2 runs: chances and hoopers.  This time the weather was cold and rainy and Lance said he liked this much better; I thought it sucked.

Lance qualified on 3 out of 8 runs, with 2 of those being on hoopers and tunnelers.  After Friday's performance I was seriously considering that this would be Lance's last outdoor trial.  Now I think I will consider running him outdoors in the fall and maybe next year's May trial depending on the weather.  Lance really does not like the heat!

Vito
Vito had a pretty good weekend!  He ran 3 runs on Friday, 3 on Saturday, and 2 on Sunday.  On all but that first weavers run he was really connected with me in our warm up and continued that walking out to the start line!  He barked at me and even jumped up on me when asked.  I just wish I could take off the leash earlier in NADAC!  On Saturday he scanned the crowd more, but didn't fixate on anybody in the ring and on Sunday he seemed as excited as ever.

Here is video of some of our starts that were taped this weekend.  It actually goes backwards from Sunday to Friday:

On the course I mostly had a happy dog.  His first run of the day on Friday and on Saturday were a bit slow, but I felt he actually ran with a little speed on his other runs.  We had some nice off courses that I praised him for!  Our biggest issue ended up being the dogwalk.  Normally Vito sucks to it and it is his happy obstacle but this weekend he avoided it whenever there was a tunnel for him to choose instead.  This was an option for 1 run on Friday and 2 runs on Saturday where he would just ignore my handling and happily go into the tunnel.  After 2 or 3 attempts Vito would go on the dogwalk but was much slower than normal.  On Sunday he only got to the dogwalk once and it was much more confident.