Alrighty! Well, morning started out very early. For some reaon I was up at 6 am this morning and wide awake at that. Deuce and Miller both slept with us last night and we all slept really good. Got up, walked the dogs and then fed them. I had three courses to walk today, team standard, speed jumping semi-finals, and peformance grand prix semi-finals. I found the results of the quarter finals online and out of 20 dogs that Q'd, Miller was 17th. Definatley alot slower than last year as he came in second place last year but still not bad for a dog with an injury. I was so excited because the semis were in the big ring this year and I had never run in the big ring before. Got my courses walked and got ready for my first run of the day which was team standard. Miller ran very well, almost back to his normal self, which suprised me for sure! He had great contacts and great weaves and I felt like I handled everything really well. I will be interested to see how he feel in the P22 standard standings. I know he wasn't his normal speed but he still ran faster than he had run all weekend.
Next run of the day was PGP semi finals. This year I felt like I was a ton more focused and more relaxed. The big ring has really huge clunky equipment including a teeter that is mammoth and a huge tire jump, bigger than any he has ever seen. I did felt like he ran a little slower than in standard but still was doing okay till about mid course. I felt myself getting ahead of him and I felt like I was having to cheerlead him on alot more than any of the other runs. The dog walk was near the end of the run and he practically walked down it and I knew something was not right. His bark had gotten a little bit higher but not as bad as in Lincoln. I did a front cross to bring him over the tire to me and he ran around the tire to the outside. I am not sure if he just couldn't jump it or didn't know what the heck it was. We have never seen a tire like that and I will try and take a picture of it so you can see how odd it looks. I decided to just finish out the course and run out so he didn't take a jump and we got an E but at that point it didn't matter. You have to run clean and he had the refusal so who cares. I decided that it wasn't worth it to run him in steeplechase semi finals if he was hurting so I scratched him so that maybe we could run tomorrow in team gamblers. Our team was sitting in 74th place but we both had clean and fast standard runs so maybe that will bring us up in the standings. Unfortunatley, I don't think any of our group made it to the finals tonight so we will probably not go and watch since we have no one to cheer on.
After we got done running, Mom and I took Miller back to the RV and massaged him and tried to stretch him. He wasn't very receptive to stretching so we decided to ice him down and let him rest. Grabbed Deuce and went back to the field to cheer the rest of the group on in their runs. Deuce got a new tug toy and got to play with another little red merle puppy. He also got to watch some dock dog diving and some flyball and disc dog. We let him play in the puddle again and I am going to try and get it on video as it is the funniest thing I have ever seen. He gets the butt scooting zoomies when he gets in water or weird surfaces so running him in agility is going to be an adventure. Bought some pictures that Tien Tran had taken of Miller that were really good and did some other shopping. I am such a whore to vendors at dogs shows!
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