AWC USA Team 2013

Making a goal, sticking to it and then accomplishing it feels good!  Besides my goal of going to tryouts and having a clean run I also made the goal to not beat myself up no matter what happened.  I am so proud that Ho and I had 2 clean runs!  Really, we had 3 clean runs but 1 run had a popped weave that I didn’t fix, and the run that we had an off course was totally my fault, not a big surprise 🙂 LOL.  I approached the line EVERY TIME with a huge smile on my face, holding and kissing my wonderful dog.  I ran EVERY run with commitment to my chosen handling options and stayed focused until the end.  I left EVERY run holding my and kissing my wonderful dog with a smile on my face.  I felt good about EVERY run!  Even the two runs that we E’d on!  Those courses were HARD.  But I was prepared!!  And I made great handling choices!  In the back of my mind “WWBD?”, “What would Bo do?”.

At times I was stressed, and un-decided, and I felt discouraged but I managed to re-focus EVERY time and that is what counts!  The mental game is hard, it takes time and energy and calories and brain power to do it.  It is hard but I feel so good after doing it!  Like I accomplished something big!  Those of you who knew me back when I ran Pickle might have seen the meltdowns and the crying, it felt bad and I made a decision to not do that anymore.  And I went to a top level competition and kept my mental crap together!  Yeah!

I really want to thank everyone who helped me reach my goal!   Eric for so many discussions and support, Bo for putting up with my shit and being a great trainer and coach, Cheryl for helping support the journey, Debbie for setting up hard courses and helping me run them, my parents for inspiring me to be me and supporting me along the way, Julie and Daneen for giving me Ho, my brother for all our woot and mounding talks, GPOL for putting up with my PEPSING and everything else, all my Thursday night peeps who put up with running those crazy courses, all my students who inspire me to be the best agility instructor I can be, Ho for being the best Ho in the world, and myself for working really hard at something!