Mad Dogs and Englishmen

I'm finally somewhat out of my post agility haze after 3 straight weeks of trialing. The weekend before last was in Pueblo, 2 1/4 hours away, and that one knocked me out the most partly because I was up at 4 am Sat. & Sun. morning and partly because it was in the mid to upper 90's both days. Poor Cody had a meltdown, not a single Q and I excused us from the ring after the 6th obstacle on Sunday during his standard run because it was clear he was completely unfocused and not having any fun. He hates the heat in general and doing agility was too much for him. Lola ran fairly well in the heat, barely missing Q's (and her titles) in snooker (popped out of the weaves at the last pole, missed a Q by one pt.-ARGH!) and Gamblers (did the gamble but blew her dogwalk contact-ARGH!). Had a nice standard run but refused to lay down on the table. She already has table issues and the dog right before us peed on the table. She stood there sniffing the wet spot and flat out refused to get on the table. Might have been the chemicals they used to clean the mess that were putting her off, who knows. She gleefully rolls around in dead frogs for crying out loud.

I took last Monday off to spend the day with an old friend who I haven't seen in 10 years or so. I had a 1 1/2 mile walk with Cody & Lola first thing in the morning then a 4 hour, 7-8 mile hike on the Mesa trail with my friend & Strummer. This was pretty stupid, esp. after a full weekend of running agility and considering the farthest I'd been walking since my surgery was around 1 1/4 hours in my neighborhood. I haven't been hiking on hills at all and the trail was fairly steep in some places. But it was such a nice day, I was so thrilled to be back on the trails and I sort of lost track of time/distance. We had a few rest stops, one when came across 2 border collies playing in the creek and I let Strummy loose to have a romp with them. Then we stopped at the turnaround point for a bit. Still, it was a lot and I had some fun with the ice packs when I got home. But a week later I'm not only fine, I went for my first 'run' yesterday and it went great. It was only 2 minutes running, 2 minutes walking for 8 minutes total but still, it was wonderful to be starting up again. Tomorrow I go again, same thing, yeeha! At this rate I should be up to a mile by, oh, September.