Tuesday, December 8, 2015

European Open Tryouts 2016

I made it!  The decision to go was iffy for most of the month, but we made it!

Overall European Open Tryouts are great.  They are fun and your fellow competitors are cheering you on. Every run at this event was amazing, lots of great handlers and speedy dogs.  The courses were awesome and challenges are hard, really hard sometimes.  There was not a single large dog team that ran everything clean, and most had multiple E's.

I am super pleased that I had a 7th place clean run (round 4), and the other I was 23rd due to a fault. I had three runs that I E'ed, only one of those E's was from an off course. In this event you can get eliminated by:  1) by off course   2) over standard course time (which is VERY tight)   3) three or more faults.

I am posting all of my runs from EO Tryouts, the good, the bad and the ugly.  Why?  Because "the good" represents some really good work and prep, "the bad" just wasn't that often, and "the ugly" really isn't that ugly :).  It is really nice to look at these runs, compare them to past runs (or even my first runs) and know that I have put in a lot of hard, but good work to make this happen.




There were some many things that went right in this event for us, on and off the course.  My nerves were under control, I felt competent in walking the courses (never felt stumped), it didn't bother me at all that we didn't get course maps,  Tangle was relaxed and excited to run, and I felt like I had really good mental management the whole weekend.

Do we have a training list coming out of this event?  Sure!  But the skills on the list are skills that I need to hone, it is not made up of skills that I didn't have.