Novice Trial, Part Deux

We ran again today and did well. The outrun was... abysmal... again. She ran up, then slowed and started to cut in. I kicked her out and she was even slower then and needed a few redirects. I knew that if I kicked her out she would slow down but if I didn't, she was pretty much going to run up the middle-- and here the dog needs to be as wide as possible (it's a narrow field) because otherwise they would have booked back up to their holding area. If I encouraged her along, she would have sped up the middle... I didn't really know how to handle that so I let her continue her out-walk and was able to grab control of the sheep. At least I know that I need to work on confidence at a distance in new areas, fo' sho!

BUt everything else was nice. We got a score of 60 and that landed us 4th place. I am pretty happy with that. On the lift the sheep split and one went and sat with the set out person. I waited for a couple of seconds to see if they would reclump ... they didn't. So I asked Soda to "get back!" and she did and went back and gathered the single (there may or may not have been a well placed shove by the set out person ) and continued on the fetch.

all in all, I was pretty pleased.