10/02/2016

Agility trial in Slovenia

September 10th Saturday, We visit Slovenian Agility competition with Gabi. 
The venue was located in the middle of beautiful Slovenian mountain valley.
Not only stunning location with layers and layers of mountains, there was also crystal clear mountain river stream and very well looked after community or shared garden right next to the competition. I assume all the vegetable has full of mountain mineral water, looks very healthy and full of nutrition :) Yum! 


We set up shade tent before the course set up :D Gabi is very organised!!
This never happened to me in my whole agility life. lol 







Not only the location, the organization and people were really lovely.  People brought beautiful cakes and sweets to collect donation to replace jumps.  Very good idea to get donation for updating equipment.  The cake were really tasty, the best quality sweets and yes, we donate a lot to swap with those best looking and delicious cakes!






Too many sweets photos :) 

Another surprise was I saw 2 police man hanging out at the competition with glass of beer! I'm not really sure they were working, but on police uniform.. so we thought they were at work :) Probably not much crime happening here!

It was comfortable temperature in the morning, but afternoon had quite strong sun. The organiser did made announcement to not leave your dogs in the car.  
I notice many people uses Silver sun reflection cloth over the car, and it reflect 70% of sun.  Nice product for Australian sun and I always wanted to buy this.  This is going to be my souvenir!

Anyways, back to agility. There was only one ring in this competition so most of people had only 2 runs in all one day. A1 (Novice) and A2 (Excellent) start in the morning, and compete in the morning only.  A3 starts in the afternoon, this means when you became A3, you can wake up at 10 or 11 am, then come to competition in the afternoon!! Or you can go home and relax in the afternoon when you are competing with A1 or A2 dogs.  How nice is this system?



I think having a one ring only - makes people very relax and watch other people's runs. You can really concentrate on your dog, never need to rush like here in Australia, always have so many runs in a day. I saw many handlers are helping another handler at course walk, giving some handling tips.




People are looking at competition result and time. 
The result is up on the board as soon as the competition finished. 

One of the jumping course in A2.
Courses were very nice.  I really liked A3 course! Challenging yet fast and flows well. 

After watched everyone's run all day, we felt we were so lucky to watched very high quality agility and very relaxed and happy dogs at this competition.  There are so many famous top handlers, I always watch those peoples run on youtube, but videos never captures their connection with the dogs so it was very exciting for me to watch how those people play and warm up/ cool down their dogs, and how they reward dogs!  

How cool to hang out with Puppy Diary star, Silvia's To and Monika's Sheltie Seven? 
Unfortunately To had a toe injury so we couldn't watch her run this day, but wow, she is pretty and super friendly ❤  








 I saw many shaved Border Collie and Shelties!! wow :D




Bi's amazing cik/cap ❤
Silvia practicing start stay with Le just before her run. 

As we are not even allowed to tug with dogs in the ring or even after the run, Slovenian dogs excitement/ speed or happiness is completely different level to Australian competition.  It is the most stupid rules we have and truly old fashion, I believe this rule came from obedience competition, and we felt that we really really needs to change this rule to achieve "Real Agility". 
I felt it is most important thing to consider right now, upgrading equipment is next!!. 
I hope Australian competition will be more relaxed about it and allow people to train at the competition someday. Restriction for tugging and "must put dogs on lead before leave the ring" totally putting dog's excitement off.  




Super midget in action!! Wow a real Le was super fast, (everyone knows she is super fast, but actually she was faster than you see on video!)  
I just couldn't believe that my camera actually caught her running :) 



 Perfect Matej's Juice! 

Here is a video of the wonderful day's run. (Miha and Duce) 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAeKsgma00I

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