When I drive in the dark to a dog show, hardly anyone else on the road, I listen to Led Zeppelin and think all these brilliant thoughts. They come so fast and furious and I write them down with a pen on whatever scrap of paper I can find in my purse or in a notebook and then I forget them and never have them again. My mind works weird at 5am when I have to move fast and get us all in the car. Half consumed with secrets of rocket science and successful dog agility and just excellent living of life in general, and half forgetting that I left my coffee sitting on the fence in the driveway and my lunch in the frig.
Also, does that make me a super old person because I listen to Led Zeppelin in the car? My face wrinkles are making me worried I turned into a super old person this summer.
This week, we left at 5am to visit Turlock for the day. Back to our quick trip, one day dog show schedule. It's hard to do this, I am deciding after all these years. If we are sticking with agility, I am going to become a person who starts going to 2 days of a trial and sleeps in a motel. The super lux way to dogshow. The Motel 6 way.
Gustavo gets out of the car and runs and his first run of the day has insanity.
OK. Not insanity. That's the wrong word. He isn't insane anymore. It just had 2 places where he ran straight instead of turning and maybe I wasn't handling well anyways. I was running extra slow and he was running extra fast and it was a very tight turn course. So jumpers run, in the toilet. He was recently 3rd in 12" Masters Jumpers top ten. Probably not anymore now.
Today was our experiment of trying to run regular runs again, instead of just doing jumpers. Back to being a regular, normal agility dog. His standard had a perfect table, poles contacts, teeter, you name it. Two errors though, one where he missed the pole entry by not slowing down and took an off course jump, and another weird run around the a-frame, much like Steeplechase Finals at the Regional. I'm not sure where that one comes from. But there was no melting down, just back on track and off he went. He was very, very fast.
Gustavo won Grand Prix! Then I messed up my brilliant high point snooker plan. And Otterpop had a nice fast standard run, although I left her on the teeter totter without releasing her and had to run back and pick her up, costing seconds that gave her 2nd place. That's all Otterpop got to do. Live with it, Otterpop.
So there were mistakes. Goddamn. Will I never be perfect? However. It was very, very nice to have normal problems. Handling and training related. Not psychological and physiological puzzles to untangle from dog brains and livers and sore legs and mental illnesses and hallucinations. Just me using the brilliant thoughts side of my brain to focus better on excellent fast running, and coming up with yet more training plans to fix the bumps in the road, while trying to keep the lost coffee mug and sunglasses side from forgetting about my genius plan for more 7's in snooker.
Normal problems, we can handle those. And we can always get more sunglasses.
3 comments:
I saw the Grand Prix run! Otterpop is awesome! So are you. So is Gustavo. I do so love watching him run. It is nice once in a while to feel like a regular handler with regular problems. Then one starts to think that one has a hope of actually fixing them and doing better next time. So--hope it stays normal for you.
You're not going all normal on us, are you?
Perfect is boring.
Do you really want perfect?
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