EO 2014 Hungary

EO 2014 in Hungary was great! Fantastic organization, really nice and helpful ring and camping crew, interesting and challenging courses, great judges, lots of amazing runs to watch (Pavel Kosek with Audi winning jumping individual large would be one to remember for a long time!), meeting old and new friends which again made me feel as a part of huge, international, pyrshep family... it was great to see you all! Things like extreme weather (hot hot hot this time) and cold showers and totally naked total strangers sharing same shower cabin with your are just one of those EO oddities that you learn to accept and laugh at (BTW I'm beginning to suspect that the presence of shared shower cabins for 3-4 people is one of the criteria for choosing EO locations. Maybe that's some idea to bring people together :)) .

We had the best possible company and great time - as for our runs, well... it could have been better. Evo got a minor injury in June and hasn't trained for almost a month, Roman was working like crazy and wasn't training either - so they had some mistakes which wouldn't happen normally. They had really nice individual agility run with 1 knocked bar and 3rd best time overall which was enough to get them in the finals as country selection. Brava had imaginary puppies last week and her phantom puppies combined with hot temperature and crowded ring entry (she is normally uncomfortable with that plus she got attacked by some dog just before entering the ring) made her run slower than usual. Despite that, we still had 3 clean runs and two of them were in the top 10, which gave us a place in the final as well. I changed my starting routine a bit before the finals plus the ring entry area was much bigger as there was just one ring by then - and so I got my normal Brava back. The course by Veronika Herendy was really fun and Brava showed her best like fantastic contacts and nice weaves entries, unfortunately I was too slow and we got eliminated. Nevertheless, she is my bestest yellow doggy in the world <3.

I have some new ideas that I need to work on, so even though we weren't particularly succesful this time, this will only make us better :). First of all, I need to experiment a little bit with the starting routine so I can make Brava feel comfortable even if there are many dogs around. Secondly, I want to teach her more independent "outs", so she can save my ass sometimes when I'm not able to get to places :).

Some videos and pictures to follow, but now - off to bed :).