04 Čvn Trial Series, Part 3: Trial Day

Finally, after all the preparation I described in the first two articles of this series, the trial day came along and brought an awfully early wake-up time with it. I am a night person, I hate mornings. Usually, you won’t catch me out of bed before 9 AM at the earliest. On this day, I was up at 5:30 AM.

Archer and Finka are really cute when I get up this early; they just can’t wrap their heads around why we are getting up at such an odd time. Even crazy Archer looks at me from his doggie bed like I’ve gone mad.

Preparation — Field, Documents, and Dogs

We got together at the field more than an hour before the judge arrived. We started going through the checklist, preparing the field with markings, setting up the obstacles properly, spray painting lines and dots for orientation, preparing the blind for down under distraction for UPr3, and so on.

In the meantime, the girls were doing hard administrative work and checking everyone’s vaccination passes, pedigrees, and various other papers they need to attend the trials. This is country-dependent to a degree, so make sure you know the regulations in your particular country and have your paperwork in order for the trial.

With the field ready and the papers all set, I made sure everyone prepared their dogs. All of them needed to be walked, and a select few required more than that. Some of them needed to visit the field and thoroughly sniff everything for them to then be concentrated during the trial. Others needed to do one last send away so they would believe in the reward at the end.

With all that done, we just sat there drinking coffee (4 sugars for me—I need that when I am nervous, and boy, was I nervous!) and anxiously waiting for the judge to arrive. There was some commotion at the gate of the training field, so I ran over and saw a stranger with two dogs who was presumably just walking by the field giving random direction instructions to our confused judge who has just arrived.

Thankfully, it all went well, and I greeted the judge at the field. She was very professional, didn’t even take a coffee, and dove straight into the papers. After she made sure everything was legit, we performed the chip check. I was allowed to use my very advanced chip scanner, so we had no issues.

Trainer’s Hardships During the Trial

After everyone put their dogs away again, it was showtime. I pulled up my plan to make sure everything was as it should be, and one after the other, they went. The trial day is immensely stressful for me; I prefer trialing with Archer over having to worry about 11 other people and wanting them to succeed so badly after they put in so much hard work.

I tried to watch everyone intently and take notes about their performance so I could give them feedback later. I took even more notes during the judge’s evaluation because the handler is usually so relieved and out of this world after finishing their trial that they are unable to remember a single word. Our judge was really good, and she gave some meaningful, smart feedback to them.

On top of that, my Finka acted as the extra dog, a job which she had to do two times during this trial. The handlers go one after the other, and when one finishes the obedience part, they go for their down under distraction. Another handler then comes in to perform the obedience part and act as the distraction. This can also vary in some countries, like in cases when the dogs go in pairs, one starting with the down and then the two of them switching places.

Once all the trials of one type are finished and there are no more dogs left, there needs to be an extra dog who will do the distraction for the last downed dog. So, my brave retired Finka performed an IBGH1 and a ZZO2.

This made it harder to take notes for certain handlers and keep an eye on everyone, but I do prefer to do the distraction myself, knowing I can fully rely on Finka to not do anything stupid and disturb the downed dog. What would I do without her?

How It All Went Down

First, we went through the BH-VTs and the IBGH trials, then Finka was up. After that, it was the ZZO1 trials. So far, so good. We had some close calls with some of the dogs just not having their best day, either being a bit too lazy in the surprisingly warm weather or just a bit too cheeky being a handful for their handlers. UPr3 was our first and only failed trial with a very important lesson learned, one which I want to cover in a separate article in the near future—stay tuned, it’s going to be interesting.

After the UPr3 we tackled (according to plan) the traffic portion of the BH-VTs. Everything went smoothly with Finka pulling another shift acting as the dog who is there to demonstrate that the trialed dog is not aggressive. Fortunately, everyone had some treats in their pockets, so she was okay with doing the hard work and getting all the attention in between the trialed dogs.

Last but not least, we had one female in heat, so her trial (ZZO2) was postponed to the very end. We had no tracking and no protection parts this time around, so everything went by pretty quickly. Being in heat, she made more mistakes than she normally would, but despite that, it was a very good trial. Finka showed off one last time as the extra dog, and we were done!

Celebration

Pizza was ordered, and we celebrated while the judge was working on the papers. After a good lunch, we thanked the judge as she really did astounding work. She judged those she deemed very good pretty harshly, pointing out even small mistakes they could learn from and giving valuable advice on where to improve.

At the same time, she judged those who were clearly nervous—as it was their first trial or the dog was clearly giving its best but just struggling with the length or difficulty of the trial—more leniently and was willing to acknowledge the limitations of breed or age. Even though she did have to give one failing grade, she did it with compassion. My hats off to one of the best judges I have ever seen.

Then, it was Instagram time. Everyone got their picture with their dog, and we did our best to do a group shot, which you can see in the title of this article. I even brought Finka along as she did put in some hard work that day.

Trial days are exhausting for me, and the intense training sessions before them are as well. However, I view them as a crowning achievement, and having 10 handlers go home with a new trial certificate is so satisfying—I love it!

I wish you the best of luck on your trial day. If you put in the work and prepare meticulously like I tried to convey in this article series, you will be successful. Such a rigorous preparation and execution might seem overkill to you if you are already experienced, but if you are a beginner, trust me, it pays off to put some work into it.

Be mindful, and let me know which trial you are about to dominate.