Ending Our Competition Season at Longfield Agility

Today we headed to Longfield Agility for our final competition of the year. We had six runs which, in hindsight, was entirely too much for a Monday morning, especially after competing in Championship and Crufts qualifying classes over the weekend!

I arrived with two very specific goals for Rio: confident start lines and better contacts.

I’m delighted to say that Rio absolutely smashed his start lines. He stayed beautifully and gave me the confidence to move into the positions I needed before releasing him. This is something we’ve struggled with at times, so I’m definitely beginning to feel much more confident in that aspect of our runs.

Our contacts were more 50/50. I want to be able to push ahead and get in front of Rio while he remains confidently in position, so that will be one of our priorities when we return to training. I’m even considering retraining his dog walk as a running contact over winter—but we’ll see!

After 6 runs, and 15,000 steps, all before 12.30pm, its safe to say both of us were completely and utterly knackered! Rio really started to slow down on his steeplechase runs, but he soldiered on.

Longfield marked our final competition of the year, and Rio will now have a well-earned six-week break before we begin our preseason training.

We haven’t finished the season with everything perfected, but we’ve finished it knowing exactly where our strengths are and what we want to improve. Most importantly, I can feel our partnership getting stronger every time we compete. Now it’s time for Rio to rest, reset and enjoy being a dog for six weeks before the winter work begins.