Bye Bye Barleylands :(

At the weekend we were at our beautiful venue, Barleylands for the last time :(. We have moved our bank holiday show to Oxford due to such a poor turnout at the Essex ground. This is such a shame as it is a pretty much perfect venue.

A few snaps of the venue

We only had racing on Sunday, so as my great team mates had set up the ring on Friday (I was at work) we decided to do a bit of training for our younger dogs on Saturday. As Fox had been doing so well in training I took the rather daring decision to run him with another dog, Holly - a staff, in the other lane....................It didn't go well. He did stay in his own lane which was great but decided to chase Holly and came down his own lane at full pelt determined to chase her at the end. I tried to stop him and he ran me over!!!! I have to point out he is a huge collie who weighs about 25kg. IT HURT!!!! I pulled my back and shoulder and my hand connected with his tooth as I tried to grab his collar. Ouch!! Needless to say Fox and I had words and I put him away. I gave him some time to think about it and brought him out again. I ran him on his own and he ran beautifully. I then put him in his new headcollar and held him near the start gates. The dogs ran past him and everytime he looked like he was too interested I pulled on his lead fairly firmly. Having the headcollar on meant he had to turn to face me, it worked really well and he was soon looking to me when a dog ran past him.

On sunday I was feeling rather sore, actually this is a bit of an understatment! Fox was not in my good books so I decided to give him a chance to redeem himself. We had a starter team withdraw and we already had a starters team in so Fox and Yogi (Tasha's dog) went into our second team. This was the 'numpty team' as we call them (bless). If the dogs just go up and down we are pleased! The other three ran then we would run either Fox or Yogi down when the other team had finished to get them used to going up and down in that type of atmosphere. It was great training and I was very pleased with Fox. At the beginning he was a bit over awed but didn't attempt to chase the dogs running round behind him, he just didn't move at all. By the end of the division he was going up and down well and coming straight back to me without me having to rugby tackle him! I'm getting more hopeful that he will do flyball every day, perhaps even next season (frantically touching wood :)).

The Running 4 Mutts and Mad Muttleys were pretty bad tbh which was down to handler errors. We swapped Jamie and Fly round for this competition and put Fly last dog in the Muttleys. Anchor dog is her favourite position as she is competetive. We did pretty good times but Andy struggled with his changeover onto Lilly and just kept getting lights. In the Running 4 Mutts Jamie really struggled with the box for some reason and had alot of trouble getting the ball out of the box. Neo then cut his stopper pad on the last race of the day. This still has not healed and has meant that we have had to pull the Running 4 Mutts out of Wimbledon at the weekend. All in all not a brilliant weekend for me!

I did get some nice pictures of some of our Terrierist team though

Paige

Baloo

I took these on my new phone so I thought they were pretty good!