Cooler weather is inspiring

This week has been perfect. The temperatures have been in the upper 70's with no humidity to weigh us down. I haven't ran the air conditioning since Sunday! I get to sleep with the windows open and it's just so nice and refreshing.

Perhaps because I'm sleeping better at night, last night I was inspired to actually set a course for the dogs! The above course was posted ages ago by judge Lisa Miller-Selthofer on her Facebook page and I had printed it out at the time because I thought it looked like fun.

My alterations included replacing jumps 1, 8 & 16 with hoops (because I ran out of jumps), turning 17 into a tire, removing 18 for space reasons and using the a-frame in place of the weaves (because it was there, in the way). I also don't tend to ever include dummy jumps for reasons pertaining to shortage of equipment, so I'm sure that tends to decrease the difficulty of the original course. But it was still fun!

The serpentine handled best with single-sided handling, which meant I had to have a decent lateral send coming out of the tunnel to be in place for the second jump and to push over to the a-frame (in my set-up it was most advantageous to try to layer the jump in front of the a-frame, but Secret wasn't digging that I and tended to run more with her because of this).

Secret surprised me with how well she sent out to the number 14 jump while I moved laterally to get in place for a front cross on the landing side of 15. She did cut in on me once, but it was only because I completely failed to direct or support her.

I tried a few different handling moves and swapping out the front crosses for rears -- It should come as no surprise that Secret far prefers front crosses and her speed shows it. In all, we ran through the course several times and I'm very pleased with how well she did.

I'm not pleased with how well I did, however, as I was seriously winded after running all three dogs twice -- And as such, was inspired by the nice weather to take everyone for a walk after Kaiser's dog walk work. Running three dogs at Champs is going to kill me if I don't get in better shape before October!