The season has officialy started here. I can't say that the action has started since the action rarely takes a break here in Groenenland, but surely we have more of it now. We run, click and also agility trainings started again. Most of the old fighters are still with me, the rookies look fairly promissing and as an extra bonus I have Shenzi, Sambo's not-so-secret admirer who still loves him, of course, but most of all it seems that she really worked hard during the winter since she's flying over the obstacles and what's even more impressing, she got rid of her 'tunnelophobia'. Good work, Shenzi and hanlder Nuki!

Yesterday we went to our second trial this year. Unfortunately this wasn't as successful as the previous one. Sambo was back to being his old self – hyperneurotic and a stranger to contacts, maybe he managed to do one (by mistake, of course). Apparently I'll have to make the 10 min game of dogdeball an obligatory preventive measure if we are ever to move from our 'status quo', the second level with 2/3 of the requirements. Oh well, at least we had fun – but then again, we always do.

Today we had a completely new type of action. There was a fund raising run/walk for homeless animals and last year I wanted to go but I couldn't, so this year I wouldn't let myself be stopped by anything. And I didn't. I didn't let neither the bad weather nor my hurting hip stop me , I armed myself with my two guys and my running equipment and went to the gathering place. There I met with some doggie friends and soon an agility friend and I pushed our way towards the start line. After a minute or so I had second thoughts about being at the front cause I wasn't sure if behind us a stampede of runners eager to go, full of testosterone and Isostar wouldn't break free. Luckily this wasn't the case; we survived the start in a presentable shape got outrun by a few individual runners and a few runners with dogs, but otherwise we kept our good starting positions right to the end. It was a 2.6 km round and at first I wanted to run two laps but I quickly saw that one would be completely enough. Firstly, we ran on a harder surface than I'm used to and my hip started to complain, but most of all I missed one detail: in order to have my hands free I tied one leash around my waist, put Sambo on a harness and clipped his leash onto the first one. The system worked flawlessly for the first few metres. But then Gregor outpassed us on a bike to take a pic of us and foam came to Sambo's mouth, he started pulling as if he were on the Iditarod and the leash I had around my waist instantly turned into a corset. The more he pulled, the more my silhouette got baroque-like. I suppose you can easily imagine that after two minutes of running like this I saw that I couldn't last more than about 15 min of running without being able to breathe, so we unanimously decided to end our run with the first lap. Nevertheless, the quad Urška/Urška/Sambo/Lu with Gregor as the steersman fought well and ran and cycled across the finish line with our heads held high. It was fun, tough and adrenalin-fulled. We'll definitely repeat it next year, but I have to figure out a new system for around my waist so I won't look like a projectile snapped in half.

Until next time!

The beginning of our action in a torpedo style



A smile for the camera...



Victory! :)