Preparing for NADAC Trial this weekend...

This week I have been trying to prepare for the the NADAC trial this weekend. This trial is at PBH and sponsored by C2P2. We are only going to run one day, on Saturday. I ran clover at PBH at a show ago before, otherwise it will be the first time she has competed away from Teamworks. It is a games trial meaning they will not have the regular or jumpers classes. We are entered in 6 runs on Saturday, 2 novice Weavers, 2 novice Touch-n-Go and 2 Tunnelers classes. The Weavers classes are going to be the most difficult. Tunnelers is the only one that clover has ran in competition before.

As I mentioned a week or two ago, we have been focusing on 3 major areas to prepare for this trial, weave entry and 10th pole popout, contacts and turns on tunnels. I

I feel we are ready for the trial. Our week point is definitely the weave poles. Clover has never done 12 weave poles in competition before (Novice runs only have 6 weave poles) and last night she was having problems with popping out at the last weave pole when we did a full set of 12. We will see, if she has difficulty with them in the first weavers run, I may pull her from the second.

At home, I have been working this week mostly on Jumping grids, since I only have four jumps. At COW this week they had a jumpers course set up. I have started running Clover on the elite course at COW and she is doing very well. In fact most of the time after running the course 2 times, she has it memorized. In the practice ring they had a tunnelers course set up and we ran that several times. She is doing well with tunnelers, and if she doesn't get a tunnelers Q this weekend, I know it will be all my fault because she is ready.

Clover is doing very well with contacts now too. The real question is going to be if the excitement of the trial changes how she attacks them. This is going to be the first time we do a touch and go run, it will be a real test. In a touch and go run there are only contacts and tunnels.

On Monday, my wife took Clover to Flyball class, and it sounds as though they are doing very well. I may go next week to check up and see what they are upto...

Oh, and wouldn't you know it. The forecast is for storms tonight, so we may not have class again!