MACH Score

What an amazing weekend of AKC Agility with my two wonderful boys, Reason & Score.  The American Belgian Malinios Club AKC agility trials were held at Simon arena in Cannon Falls, MN (about 30 minutes south of St. Paul) in an equestrian center. This trial was the first AKC trial to be held in this arena and the ABMC went from a one ring trial to this three day, two ring trial with a wonderful judging panel. Thank you to both this club and the Golden Retriever clubs (next week trial at the same site) for taking a chance on moving their trials to this dirt arena.  What a wonderful trial.

Reason made his comeback after having his toe amputated back in November and he put in some wonderful runs. Today, he even placed 3rd in Excellent Jumpers with a time that was .01 seconds from 2nd place.  He is running better than he has run and nearly double Q'd today except that I mishandled him in two areas, which I was able to correct in Score's subsequent run.

Score went into this weekend needing one double Q to finish his MACH and he saved the suspense for the last day.  He had a great jumpers run and was just .06 seconds behind Reason's run and just out of 4th place. Going into Standard, I knew what I had to do to get him through that course clean - one was that I HAD to get a front cross (and not a rear cross) in before the second to the last jump, which was a wingless jump right after the chute.  Score has some challenges coming out of tunnels and chutes seeing things fast enough and I was not as confident using a rear cross there as I felt he would probably drive to the wing jump, which was the last jump.

Since I was able to get that front cross in with Reason, I knew I could get it with Score. But it was very close. When he went over that last bar, the crowd broke out in excitement which really touched me. Score was so funny because when I was trying to do a quick lap with him, he wouldn't give up his leash and wanted me to tug. I got him to drop it and threw it off, but he went to grab it again. I finally convinced him to run with me one more time.

Here is Score's MACH run. Thanks to Mark O'Sell for videotaping along with the wonderful comments and keeping the camera running before and after the run.