We had thought that the Surrey HTM shows were our last opportunity to qualify for Crufts, due to me working on the weekend of every other show. What we hadn’t realised was that I was working on the Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday at the end of August, and the Forest Oak Farm HTM show with Advanced Crufts Qualifier classes was on the SATURDAY. So, like absolutely crazy people, we drove all the way to the Forest of Dean (West of England) to compete on Saturday, to drive all the way back to Lincolnshire that night, and then all the way to Norwich to work for the following 2 days.
Wow was it worth it though! I just had one of those perfect days where the stars aligned and I achieved absolutely everything I could have dreamed of achieving. The day began with Strike winning Intermediate Freestyle, his second Intermediate win, so that moves him up into Advanced. The journey was already worth it! Trip didn’t work his best round ever in the Advanced Freestyle, but neither did many other dogs, so I really had no idea how the results were going to play out.. but he did it! He qualified for the Crufts 2023 Freestyle final!
I decided to compete with Foxy in Advanced Heelwork for the first time in, quite honestly, years. She was SUCH a good girl, I was really pleased with her and I was interested as to where we would place to get a bit of a benchmark as to where we are with our training after not competing for all this time. I couldn’t believe it when the results were called out and I found out that Foxy had also qualified for Crufts 2023, in the Heelwork to Music final! Her first ever Crufts!
I’m so relieved and pleased, as I know I’d have been a miserable bore all Winter without having a semi final or Crufts to keep me motivated haha! So proud of Trip and Fox and I’ve already started working on some new moves with Trip for his new routine and really polishing up Foxy’s heelwork!