Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Racing in Tehachapi

The Tehachapi mountains overlooking the field

Finding Greyhound competition at amateur race meets is pretty tough out here in California, particularly the northern end where we live. So, when our friends, Ellen and Mike Cobleigh, said that they were interested in running their Greyhounds at the LGRA meet down in Tehachapi we packed up all the dogs and headed down there to meet them.

Tehachapi is a small city in Kern county just west of Mojave. Although small and out-of-the-way, it's got some beautiful landscapes, and a nice little sports field that is perfect for racing. It's a good five hour drive from where we live, so we decided to drive down the night before and stayed at a motel in Mojave.

Check-in for the meet started bright and early at 7:30am. Temperatures can get pretty high in that area, especially in the summertime, so we wanted to do our best to beat the heat. It was a small meet, but with everyone's help we got through pretty efficiently, and finished around 1:00 in the afternoon.

As it turned out, Hattie was pretty un-enthused about racing that day (for whatever reason, lol). She finished all three programs, but just barely. I don't know if it was the heat, or the elevation, or what, but her lackluster performance was definitely the polar opposite of the Agars.

Final scores

Pi, Patti, and Gil ran three very exciting races, with Pi ending up the victor of the meet. He and Gil are always an interesting match for one another. I think if Gil were younger he would probably edge out his son in the speed department, but as it stands now, Pi manages to beat his dad just barely. It would be interesting to see how they would finish on a longer track. Gil always seems to be gaining on Pi more and more towards the end of the race.

Anyway, it was a really nice little meet, and as always there was a lot of good company. We may not be able to make it down to all the southern California race meets, but we will try to return again soon.

Friday, August 8, 2014

Pi's BIG Jump

Photo by Jairi Rai

Apologies for the delay in reporting on this, but I recently finished taking the California Bar Exam, so between preparing for it and recovering from it I haven't had much time to post to the blog.

Anyway, there's not much to say in this post other than that Pi had a really awesome time at the CA State Fair Splash Dogs event. We were only able to attend the last day, but that was okay with me because the last day is the day for the finals competition, and if Pi could qualify I definitely wanted to jump for that.

Photo by Jairi Rai

He started out the day doing some pretty mediocre jumps, which was partly my fault because I didn't throw the toy far enough. With the way he's been jumping between the junior and senior divisions I was worried he wouldn't qualify for finals, but he just managed to get in for the senior finals (yay!).

Photo by Jairi Rai

When our time came to do the last two finals jumps, I don't know what came over him, but Pi broke all his personal best records with a whopping 19 foot jump!!  Just to put that into perspective, his personal best up until that time had been 16 feet. He improved by 3 feet, putting him into the Semi-Pro division. As the day had gone on, he was hesitating less and less, and by the time finals rolled around he didn't hesitate at all, at least not that I could tell. I hope that this event was not just a fluke and that he will continue to jump without hesitation. If he keeps it up he should be jumping at the highest level possible soon enough.