Ta-daa!

Who'd of thunk it - not me at least. Bigi won an A3 competition! Not only that, but he had the second-fastest time of all dogs from all height classes. Strange things do happen :)

Action man Bigi :)

Here's a few action shots from Bigi's first international class coompetition two weeks ago!

Bigi's agility year in statistics

Once a scientist, always cursed. Anyway, ever since Bigi's first agility run I have been trying to keep some stats on his progress with, among other things, the most time-consuming obstacles - weaves, dog-walk, seesaw. Here we have some results calculated from competition run videos (which are not a representative sample of all runs, lucky for readers as this saves you from having to suffer further analyses :) ). The chart represents the last year but only around half of our actual competition runs(time on X axis).

We can see that there is hope - small man is becoming faster, as the lines of best fit show. For comparison I add my measurements of what top small dogs are doing. These are my own measurements from selected videos (WC, Crufts, etc) and are somewhat slower times than what are sometimes quoted as averages.

We see that Bigi's seesaw was doing mighty fine at the beginning of this year (around time "15"), but is regressing for some reason now (I think this is just bias as there are not many recent recorded runs - mostly the seesaw has been quite good). Dog-walk times are improving but still at least one second slower than ideal. No worries - running contact training still needs some work, and we have gained at least 1 second on average since starting it.

Weave poles appear to be the worst of the bunch, with Bigi's time on average around 1 second worse than those at the top. I put this down to his lack of independence (my fault of course). For interest I tested out what his backyard time is for weaves. I found that there too, the average time was over 3 seconds. The record best backyard time was 2.4 seconds, but this was a rare time. The only good news from that exercise is that Sen's regular time was also around 2.3 seconds, which is KICK ARSE. Now I just have to transfer it to competition - easier said than done!

Fantastic plastic!

Finland is a country known for its appreciation of design. I'm not sure if this applies to dog sport prizes, but you can be the judge of that. While packing our takings from Finland, we took some time for some posing:

Bigi -  master of the universe (in his imagination at least)

Sen - a somewhat more modest haul. However she did get the best prize of all - a healed leg that lets her walk and run normally :)