C-Side and Crufts

After a quiet few months, it has been an intense weekend! On Saturday I judged at C-Side. What a shame this was the last C-Side show! I was very well looked after, and this show has a really nice atmosphere. In my opinion judging is not an easy thing to do well, however it is something that I think every serious competitor should experience, and the challenge of judging can certainly teach the judge a great deal! I really enjoyed watching all the different breeds and crosses working, small, medium and large. Later in the day I had the opportunity to run Becky and Zazzy round a jumping course. This must be the first full height, full course that Zazzy has done, and I was really pleased with her. Hopefully I will be able to get the video posted here soon. She has not done very many jumps at full height, and although she has no problem jumping full height, it has been obvious that she has been concentrating hard on getting her striding right. The spacings were quite close in parts of the course, but she jumped really nicely, bouncing where necessary, and responding to all my cues really nicely. Becky has done minimal training for many, many months, and only started full height again recently. I was just going to run her in veterans this year, but she was so good and such a lot of fun that maybe I will have to consider doing a little more than that after all!!
Sunday I had a fantastic day at Crufts. I got to see the two qualifying runs of the small, medium and large championships, unfortunately I didn't have a ticket to see the finals. A fantastic acheivement to qualify to be there, it was thrilling to watch. Huge congratulations to Toni Dawkins for winning both the medium and large championships (in fact Minx won the medium jumping and agility qualifiers as well as the final), and to Bernadette for getting Zen from maternity leave to reserve champion. Also well done to Nicola Garrett winning the small champ with her sheltie Indie, and Dawn Weaver for getting the reserve with the tiny little pocket rocket papillon, Puzzle. Well I've been up at 4:30am both days, and got home at 10pm tonight, so I better end this post now so I can get up for work tomorrow!