One Potato, Two Potato….

So we’ve just come off a weekend of K9NW trials with success. This usually makes a weekend feel a lot better than when one experiences perceived failure. 🙂 However, keeping things in perspective, who really defines success or failure; you, your peers, your instructor, your dog? In K9NW we always stress the “having fun” part and yet there are times when WE don’t really have as much fun as we hoped. There can be a lot of pressure to succeed and we don’t always feel like we’ve done our best. And there are times when our dogs don’t have a great deal of fun either, be it from anxiety or fear, health problems or the pressures we put upon them.

This weekend Zen and I competed in our first Level 2 Container trial. Containers are our bugaboo. Zen’s enthusiasm propels him into a search area without really thinking so when he catches odor he looks at me in excited amazement. He’s also a dog who freezes up while in prey drive. Combine those two things and we’ve had a lot of false alerts in Containers. So to pass this trial with *I think* second place out of only 7/25 dogs who passed, I feel much more confident going into our next NW3 trial. (No awards ceremony so this is just by mental calculation glancing at the final tallies.)

Emmy and I competed in the Elite division trial the next day. We earned our minimum 150 pts and ELT1 title at our previous trial so there was NO pressure really at our 3rd event. I was EXCITED to be there, to hang out with friends and spend some time coloring. (Yes, it is relaxing!) Emmy, at 11-1/2 years old, is still full of fire and it’s always fun hanging on for the ride, especially w/o a title on the line. We’d left a few hides behind in the last trial so I decided to risk a few calls this time and earned a few falses but the beauty of this division is that it doesn’t matter! You just lose 1/2-hide and can have up to 2 per search area.

So here’s where our handler error comes into play (because there’s always at least one!): In our last search of the day we had three hides to find in 2-1/2 minutes. Three potatoes. Trois pommes de terre. Tres patatas. This was a mixed element search with 2 rows of containers along the sides of a long covered breezeway. Emmy tends to ping-pong amongst containers, knocking and flinging them over as we go so the little decorated metal trash cans were getting tipped over as we went. Things started out pretty well but I was either turned around or tired because the word “Finish” apparently came out of my mouth after finding only 2 hides with LOTS of time left. I was actually confused after the first call, not sure if we had gotten one or two. I realized the faux pas right after our search but of course it’s too late then. Sigh… The GOOD news is that we ended up with a 2nd place in another search finding 5 hides in 1:56.53 and found 19/22 hides overall. Now that felt good! 🙂

So back to what defines success. In Emmy’s world she got to play in 4 different really cool search areas, earned her tug many times over, got doted on by friends new and old and relaxed like a dog the rest of the day. Pretty sure that was success for her. In my world, despite my failure at counting I still came home with a couple of ribbons. Better yet I got to play this great game with my 11-1/2 year old dog and hang out with friends on a beautiful California day = success. I would like more of those, please.