2009 has been a trying year! Ellie started to compete in Agility in January and we have done quite a few agility shows during the season. She resumed training with Aylesbury Canine Training Society and is also training with A to Zooom. We concentrated on her agility as the children were also competing. We didn’t do much obedience - perhaps we should have done...

Ellie is a very fast border collie and, although she is small, she flies round a course. She has always had trouble keeping all the poles up and she regularly knocks the bars. Her jumping action is long and low and she works far ahead of me. If I try to run with her, she races me and makes more mistakes. Fortunately I have good control (thanks to our obedience training) and our waits and contacts are generally solid. Towards the end of the season we were starting to keep all the poles up in about 50% of our runs.

Unfortunately, this was about the time she started to miss her weave entries. This was due to shear speed. She does not collect her stride as she enters the weaves and crashes into the 2nd pole. Even if she does get a good entry, she often skips a weave in the middle. I tried to retrain the weaves and did make some progress but it is not a problem that has completely gone away!

If we had got it together, we would have been Grade 3 by now! Ellie is often seconds faster that the winning dog on a course but somehow something always seems to go wrong. It is always the courses where the poles stay up, that she fails the weaves, or vice versa!

At KC International, we managed to keep all the poles up and successfully complete 12 weaves - but, for some unknown reason, she chose that particular course to fly off the top of the see-saw! 5 faults- again!

At RVA we actually got a clear round, but as this was unexpected (!) I held her contacts, costing us several seconds, and we finished in 2nd place, a second behind the winning dog!

Despite some flashes of brilliance from time to time, we finished the season on a seriously low note! We went to Dogs In Need and spent a week trying to get that ellusive clear round. We did actually get one clear, but with an annoying “twiddle” as my handling wasn’t quite precise enough, we finished 3rd. The rest of the week went from bad to worse as Ellie got more and more out of control. I removed her from the ring twice as I couldn’t get her to listen. She simply barked and spun. We were going backwards!

So I haven’t done any agility with Ellie since August. I’m not quite sure what to do next! I probably need some help - someone to take a fresh look at our training...

In the meantime, I have gone back to training the obedience. I am retraining Ellie’s scent and sendaway and am trying to improve the heelwork. She needs to do something! We’ve got 2 more obedience shows before the end of the season and I am also intending to see what I have got with Fin. I’m sure he is not ready for the ring yet - but at least it will give me an idea of what we need to work on, over the winter!

... and since I have failed to get any good pictures of Ellie actually doing agility, here is a much more typical picture of her wallowing in the mud - plus a pic of Laura and Sax being much more successful!

This page was updated 14th September 2009