Agility Competition

“A competitor will find a way to win. Competitors take bad breaks and use them to drive themselves just that much harder. Quitters take bad breaks and use them as reasons to give up. It's all a matter of pride.” - Nancy Lopez

We had a (*mostly*) great day at agility. Dakota was considered one of the top three dogs, so headed her own team. By rights, we should have had the strongest team, but the stars weren't properly aligned, and our team came in last. Dakota only had one completely clean run (which I, of course, forgot to video), but she still did well enough to be in the final run-off. In that run-off, she had the best time of all and won the overall gold medal (for individual dogs).

Here's one of her other runs (yes, that's me groaning when Dakota goes off course, and yes, I'm breaking my own rule and posting a vid w/ my DD):



DD had butterflies in her tummy all day long, had two crying jags (because of poor runs and one bad choice she made--which actually overrode MY choice, which made it worse, because it turned out I was right), and was really affected by the spirit of competition.

Dakota, OTOH, was completely unaffected by the pressure of heading her own team:



The best thing that happened was that Dakota actually outran the dog who typically wins every competition to win her medal. Now... this dog fell off the walk-it, which dramatically slowed her down, but even so, it was a moment of great triumph (that probably won't happen again, lol).

Amazingly, the team that won the team portion of the competition was the little dog team (with one exception, a sharpei who isn't very fast):



One of the Yorkies is just an incredible agility competitor. He is so fast and accurate! Incredible.

Here is our team (and, yes, I purposely chose the picture with DD's hair covering her face, lol):



It was fun and a challenge and I may end up running Dakota at least once next time, because she listens to me better, but regardless I'm proud of both my daughters *G*.

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I'm writing this the night before, so I don't have a NaNo update for you. If you're interested, check the JaNoWriMo blog a little later in the morning.

Happy Monday!!!!!!

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