Eventful Flyball Weekend!

This weekend Missy and I traveled to Temple, Texas for a tournament. She was 110 points away from her next title, FMCH, or 15,000 points, going into the tournament. She ran on a Regular team with our club, and part time on an Open team with another club.

Our Regular team was a hot mess in the first couple races. We were trying to figure out the running order. A couple dogs kept dropping balls. For one of our dogs. this was her first full tournament back from a TPLO surgery. We re-arranged it and put Missy 3rd. Some background- for the last year and a half or so, we've been keeping Missy as the anchor (4th) because she had a habit of charging the dog behind her and sometimes pushing the dog around the jumps. But she's also a good anchor because she actually races the other dog and increases her speed enough to win sometimes. BUT I'm happy to report she was able to have a dog behind her all weekend without any issues. And we were even able to get nose to nose passes on her. If there were close passes, we could see in video that she was turning her head slightly towards the dog, but it wasn't a full on charge. So hooray!!

On the open team, she was the start dog. We ran this line-up in September and knew the dog behind her wasn't going to give into her charging (Luckily it wasn't a problem). But since she was starting, we were able to get her line to line times. Her personal best had been a 4.399 seconds but hadn't run that fast in a while, usually runs 4.4-4.5 seconds. But we never truly know what her line to line time is unless she's running start and she hasn't run that position consistently in a while. After we finished our first race on the Open team, I went to look at her times. The first heat, she ran a 4.3xx, second heat she ran a 4.279, and the third heat she ran a 4.271!!! She set a new personal best! I am so excited! We are pretty confident she is the fastest Sheltie currently running in NAFA, and possibly the fastest Sheltie in the history of NAFA. But there truly isn't any way to know unless you go around and ask all the owners of Shelties what their best times were... and who has time for that lol.

She did get her FMCH title in the 4th race on Saturday. So now we are on the long road to Onyx, which I'm crossing my fingers happens sometime in the Fall. Our Regular team also finally got our stuff together and ran pretty well on Sunday. We broke our club's record with a 17.9 something. That was cool! So it was overall a pretty successful weekend. And I'm very proud of my little super star. She just loves the game!

 

I don't have any video from this weekend yet. We did take some, but I'm not sure if he's compiled it yet. I'll post it once I have it though!

Here's video from November. She's the 4th dog.
https://www.facebook.com/TXTwisters/videos/1079014132138099/?theater
https://www.facebook.com/TXTwisters/videos/1079158575456988/?theater