A Life In Dogs

An Agility Champion’s No Good Very Bad Debut

I scoff at your trial horror stories

Our dog Sasha’s 16th birthday was this week, which set me to reminiscing about some highs and lows of our time together. She’s already been the subject of four pieces, We Have Them For Such A Short Time, They Kicked My Dog Out of The Hospital, Food Before Love and I Tripped On the Dog Today, Oh Boy. But hey, the world can always use more dog stories.

Both Sasha and Nick are Belgian Shepherds of the Tervuren variety, one of the breeds we focused on because I specifically wanted to run agility.

If you’ve never seen dog agility you should check it out. It’s kind of amazing. Here’s Sasha and me running a distance challenge course. The handler isn’t allowed to cross that strip of tape on the ground, so the dog has to rely on voice and hand signals.

Tervs also — and I am not making this up — smell good when they’re wet. Which is a plus when you live in the Seattle area, because your dog is wet a lot.

In any event, the day came for our first formal trial. It was much earlier and colder than I’m happy with in the morning, and naturally the first run had to be her worst event. So I’m studying the course tired, chilly, and worried. Odds of success were low.

But the worry was unnecessary, the run ended well before she took on the difficult obstacles.

Now, here are two of the three things you need to know for this story. One is that I embarrass very easily. It’s not a good trait and brings me no happiness, but there it is. I’m getting better as I approach my sixth decade, but this was almost fifteen years ago.

The second is that when Sasha has to go, she has to go. “Holding it” is not her forte. Experienced handlers probably sense where this is heading.

But don’t worry, it’s actually a lot worse.

So we set off from the start line with the human’s heart in his throat and the dog’s dinner much further down her intestinal tract. We hadn’t gotten far before she stopped to, well, disqualify herself.

I was mortified.

An older and wiser me would know that shit does in fact sometimes happen, but that lesson had not yet been learned. Feeling every audience member’s eyes on us, we did the walk of shame off the course.

We hadn’t brought a crate to set up by the ring, so we went back to the Subaru and put Sasha in the cargo area. After a healthy spell of feeling sorry for myself, my wife and I went inside to watch.

Some time later we went back to the car. As we approached, I noticed there was a dog in the driver’s seat. Which was unexpected. Apparently I hadn’t latched the rear seat properly, so our petite girl — she’s actually too small to show in conformation — had squeezed through and stationed herself up front to keep an eye out for our return. When we came into view she was very excited to see us, until it occurred to her she wasn’t really supposed to be where she was.

Now the third thing, the one I didn’t mention before, is that young Sasha had a bit of a submissive urination problem when she got nervous. And yes, it went exactly how you’re thinking it did.

So we got back to the car, returned the dog to her proper place, and used a towel to dry the seat as best we could. We also discovered that she’d found and consumed my lunch, an andouille sausage sandwich with spicy mustard. For which some sort of price would surely have to be paid down the line.

To recap: we’d had poop on the course and pee on the driver’s seat. I’d had my lunch stolen and there was the prospect of a distressed canine digestion on the horizon. It wasn’t even 10 o’clock.

Tell me, how were the first two hours of your agility career?

By the time Sasha and I retired some years later we’d gotten pretty good at it, and she has a string of titles as long as your arm. But if anybody you know ever worries their agility career is getting off to a slow start, send them my way for a pep talk.

We survived our first day. You can survive yours.