"Patience is the companion of wisdom" - Saint Augustine

We have now just turned into mid-november 2011 and my competing season has finished. Our last competition was in Åsen on 15-16 October.

During this competition, I was so lucky to get a few well-earned words of wisdom from my lovelly wife, and a few knocks at the back of the head from some good friends. It is always good to have people pushing you in the competitive scene ;) Below is a video-compilation of our runs in October:

As you can see from the video, we had our good day and our bad day :( The bad one was on saturday, where we didn't complete a single run or, in my mind, not a good experience.

On sunday however, things started to go alot better, with our first finished run of the weekend. Unfortunately Leija reacted to one of the course helpers, which in turn resulted in alot of time spent in getting here to finish the weaves correctly. At that time my motivation drops to the floor and I loose some interest.

Without going too much into details regarding this competition, I can whole heartidly say that I was happy by the end of the weekend with the results I obtained. As long as I had fun doing, I will rate that as a success!

But I would also look to evaluate my entire season as a whole:
- As this was our first competitive season as a team, I didn't have the highest expectations results wise.

We started in 25 individual runs this season and ended up finishing 5 of them. Of these five, one of the runs that I am most happy with, is the Jump 1 run from Arendal 01 May this year. Movie of this run is nr 3 on the clip:

This run really shows me the potential in Leija and myself as a team, but also showed me what some of my key areas of improvement were. Sharper turns, better contact and better weaves!

Like I mentioned above, my expectations for this season wasn't all that big. My main goal was to have fun, but also to try to run as efficient and calm as possible. Minor goals was of course to finish a course, hopefully a clean run, but it was not a major goal. One of the down-sides of not getting full contact with a fast dog like Leija, reflects in the average time & faults of the finished courses in 2011; of the 5 runs, we had a average running speed of 2,56 m/s. Average faults is 10,216 per run!

Atleast we finished five runs :D

Highlights of the 2011-Season:

- My definatelly best highlight for the season, would be the training session with Seppo Savikko, a finnish and internationally renowned agility trainer and also team captain for the finnish national team in 2007-2008 and also in 2012-2013. I was fortunate enough to be able to borrow the agility dog belonging to our breeder, Johanna Stolt, during this session and I can not show my gratitude more for that :) :) :)

What I found amazing, was that just the smallest tips and advise on how to improve the turning-issue and getting Leija to focus more on turning rather than running straight ahead, helped so much in the degree that we actually managed to finish two runs two after the session in the October movie.

- Second highlight was the jump 1 run in Arendal, which you can see above. This showed me the coming potential of Leija and myself as a agility-unit.

Goals for the 2012-Season:

- My main goal for this season will be to continue to have fun. Work on the joy of doing what we are doing and try to get more into the celebrating good runs and ignoring the bad runs.

- Try to qualify for class 2 in both agility and jumping ( 3 clean runs in each branch )

- Get a average of 3,2mtr per second in running speed across all parcours run.

- Have atleast one training session with Seppo Savikko and one session with another trainer.

Hopefully these goals will be achievable within the year, and I will be sure to adjust them half way :) Maybe I can even put down some more :)

Wish us luck

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of our friends.

Tommy & Leija