Four days of agility...

Greater St. Louis Agility Club and Gateway Agility Club held 2 day agility trials back-to-back Thursday thru today (Sunday). Four days of agility has taken its toll on me and I'm beat. Just getting the car unloaded was a challenge. The knee gave me trouble, but all in all, it was a good four days. We got four Q's in four days, two of them on Friday for a precious DblQ , (Saturday was a bust). Maggie has done a good job of adjusting her speed to allow me to keep up without running, and she has been doing a great job of racing way out for far jumps while I hobble along a shorter path. So even with the handicap, we still picked up a couple placement ribbons, a new title (MX) and another 50 or so MACH points.
Speaking of which, you can tell the people with the slower dogs that really struggle for MACH points because they can tell you at any time EXACTLY how many they have. Maggie will never want for MACH points, we'll be fighting for those Double Qs. So when people ask "how many points do you have?" it surprises some of them when I say, "I don't know 300... 350." They can't believe that I don't really know.
We did get to see a couple of our fellow handlers earn MACH championships this weekend. One of them did something that I've never seen before and it brought tears to a lot of eyes. Normally when a team earns their MACH, they turn back to the last jump, remove the top bar and take a celebration run through the course. But before this handler did that, she turned to her dog, fell to her knees and gave him a big hug. She gained a lot of respect from me after she did that- and it makes me sort of sad that everyone doesn't congratulate their teammate first. Congratulations Debbie and Forest... you deserve that MACH and you looked like Champions today!
Anyway, I took a lot of video this weekend, and I'll try to get some of it loaded to youtube this week. I videotaped some really top notch handlers- some of their runs worked out and others didn't- but either way there is a lot to be learned by watching other teams. But for now, I'm going to go to sleep...ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.