Maintaining perspective :-)

It has been a very long time since I have had a chance to sit down and write in my blog. I do enjoy writing, but, it, like a lot of things seem to fall by the wayside as life gets busier and busier! However, after the last few months I have had a chance during my travels to reflect on the year so far, and just stuff in general:-) Primarily, my thoughts have revolved around having the ability to be a type A++ personality, and yet, still maintain proper perspective when things do not go exactly the way you wanted. This is even harder to do when things seem to be going essentially perfectly, until they aren't. It is so incredibly easy to be a good sport when it is all sunshine and rainbows, the question is can you be that same good sport when some clouds roll in? Actually, it is not just about being a good sport, gracious winner, and, of course, a gracious loser. It is about how you feel about yourself during the high times and the low times. Now realize when I say low times I am talking about a very inconsequential thing in the grand scheme of this thing we call life. Agility is not going to cure cancer or be the thing that brings on world peace, but, it is very important to those of us that are passionate about the sport. It is even more important at the moment we are at that trial, step to the line, and, lay it all out there in front of God and everyone :-) When you do well the euphoria you feel is a high like no other, when things go bad it can be at that particular moment quite devastating. How do we keep it all in perspective? I have been on a high since USDAA Nationals, and although I have been competing at the USDAA Nationals for many years and have always done fairly well, this past year was the very best ever!!!, this was followed by and incredible showing at the AKC Nationals, followed by winning the SW Regional GP with not one but 2 dogs, followed by winning again the next weekend at the Rocky Mountain Regional. Wow, this is obviously how it is supposed to go down, right? It is now just step to the line, and voila! magic happens, we win, the crowd goes wild! Oh yea, until it doesn't... This past weekend was AKC World team tryouts, I was ready! Mentally prepared, as physically prepared as any person who is allergic to most forms of exercise can be, my dog is ready, heck he has been winning everything lately, let's go do this too! I went to tryouts knowing I actually had a shot this year, Maze is running like a well oiled machine and I have not been half bad either! We arrived Friday morning, set up, reconnected with a bunch of friends, and got ready to practice. Practice went extremely well, I am feeling super confident, Maze is feeling great, ready for Sat. Bring on the crazy courses! Sat. started with a wonderful standard agility course, I walked it with confidence, reminded myself to pay attention to the process, did my warm up routine, Maze got a massage... I stepped to the line, released Maze and we were off, totally in the zone, After the last jump I was ecstatic, clean run!!! Until I was told we missed the dog walk contact, I was so completely unprepared for this, he NEVER misses a dog walk contact! Well, guess what, today he did. Immediately I was disappointed and came very close to throwing a major pity party for myself, how could this have happened, there goes my chances for World team, my life is over! Except it wasn't... Maintaining perspective, the reality is I went to tryouts feeling very confident, but, more importantly really WANTING it. So, when we started out with a faulted round after so many clean rounds at the events leading up to this I was pretty thrown, and then I remembered, this is one Sat. after 1 round of agility, things happen, there is always another round, always another trial, and, right now the pleasure of just being here and able to run my awesome dog. Round 2 rolls around and I pull up my boot straps and go to the line feeling incredibly confident, that lasted until I under rotated a front cross 2 jumps from the end of an up to that point, perfect and fast clean run, I came out of the front cross rotation and realized too late that I was sending Maze to the wrong jump!!!! OMG, I might as well quit agility right now! Are you kidding me, what have I done to deserve this? The answer is nothing, it is just one of those things that happen, bummer that it happened in this event on this day, but, it happened. Keep it in perspective! Last run of the day, my goal, to prove that I can come back from these unfortunate occurrences and run the type of course that I know Maze and I can run. Well, we did just that, it was a thing of beauty, we were a perfectly in sync (mostly), we were a dance team out there and we nailed it! YIPPEE!!! After the class was over I went to check our score and see if we got a placement, well, not only did we not get a placement but we had incurred 5 faults for being over the course time by .1!!!! Course times are figured at the end of the class by adding 10% to the fastest overall time, well we landed .1 over that time, SERIOUSLY! It was definitely starting to feel like someone, somewhere was out to get me, but, they weren't, it was just another run on any given Saturday in the sport of agility. I did a lot of talking to myself that evening and found that I was not upset about the day or the runs, as a matter of fact I was overall very happy with what Maze and I did on Sat. and I knew that any other Sat. it could be our turn to be "perfect". I went to tryouts with the goal to do my best and hopefully end up in a position that made it really hard for the team coach not to select me, by end of day Sat. I knew the latter part of that goal was not to be, however, I did do my best on Sat. and I was vey happy and proud of that accomplishment! The courses were tough, the pressure was incredibly high, and, the talent was off the charts, yet, we still did awesome, that is called maintaining perspective! Sunday was another day and, Sunday was our day, Maze and I put up 2 awesome clean runs, each landing us in the top 10, not too shabby in the field of dogs we were running in. The weekend ended not with a spot on the World team , but, with me feeling very satisfied with our performance, happy to have been there, and, honored to be my dogs teammate! I have been in this sport a very long time and it can be tough sometimes to hold it together when it feels like everything that could go wrong does, it is hard to stay gracious when everything seems to be going your way, and, you can easily start to take it for granted. Luckily, the variables definitely outnumber any amount of consistencies that we see at trials from week to week and these do tend to keep us humble, it also hopefully, makes us stronger and this is the result "if" you maintain perspective! Next week it is off to Belgium for Maze and I to represent the USA at the WAO World Championships, we are both ready, feeling good physically, feeling good mentally. We will both do our best and if the day is ours we will bring home some medals, if not, we will still have the experience of being there, the lessons we learned along the way, and, each other! It does not get any better than that, so... Let the games begin!