New year (2016) and high hopes for this season

First competition in 2016 took place near Viljandi (Heimtali stables) on 16th of January and the judge was from Lithuania, Jurate Miliunaite.
It was extremely cold that day and basically at that time were the coldest weeks of this winter. In many nights the temperature fell below -25°C. Funny thing was, that I was ill and had very high fever, about 39°C, and didn't even notice it for three-four days. I was a bit feeble and had slight cold shivers, but it didn't bother me. Just went on to competition and the next day we had a training and so on, until I took my temperature and was amazed. Luckily I got well in a few days. But enough about me, lets go on with the competition and results.
To my suprise we weren't so bad after such a long break, about 1.5 month since the last competition. There were some problems and lack of cooperation in some cases, but I blame it on lack of training, because we had training time only once a week for a long time. Thereof most of the turns were wide, speed was low and some bad contacts. The last ones were not directly mistakes, but just not well performed like we practiced.
First run was excellent, clean run and speed more or less ok (4th speed). Definitely we have to take in to account that first run is usually very problematic to us. Either we break down the course or do something else stupid. This time we got 4th place with our clean run.
Second run was DSQ, nothing much to talk about it, because don't remember for what we got DSQ. Probably bad leading and my body position.
In third run we were 10th with a bad speed and 2 faults.
To sum it all up - more training, more everyday running and activities to get the weight down a bit and speed up again. Anyway, I think we are getting better and head for the podium places.

Jeeiiiiiiiiii!!!!! We won a course... and a second one

This time our own club, "Säde", organized a competition on 14th of November 2015 in Tartu and the judge was Lidia Belyaeva (LV).
All the courses were not so difficult, but like always Erk demolished everything on the first course. He ran all over the place and didn't notice my signs at all. Adventually, when he just jumped in to my legs I took him of the course and looked at him with a very mean look. Some cautionary words were also mentioned, but just a little bit. All that improved Erk so much, that we ran the second course so well, we even won it with no mistakes. That felt very good, specially the clean run. Our speed was a bit slower than Dints and Marje had, but they made one mistake (don't remember if it was a bar drop or jumping of the dog walk).

A part from the first run that went sooooooo badly, we manadge to got disqualified in the third run also. I don't remember anymore for what, but probably I sent him to fantasy land (bad body position). I guess we put all our strenght to that second run :-D

Two weeks later (28.11.2015) we went to Maardu for a competition where Zsuzsa Veres (HUN) was the judge.
She did excellent courses with many turns that needed precise handling and what I enjoyed most was that we won again one course with a clean run. Though our two other runs went as usual. From the first run we got 15 points (bars again) and 11th place, but the speed was quite ok. We would have done much better and you can see it from the video below.




Second run we won and our speed was in top three, but other competitors had some faults (look at the table below). In the third run 14th place with two mistakes, but speed was super and we were the fastest. Never mind the faults. Sure I'm a bit dissapointed that we didn't get to podium with the last run, because they have very good prizes at Maardu competitions, but thats our problem and my handling. Hope to do better next time.

Speed is improving, but the bars are still dropping

Until now, we haven't had any competion, where we haven't been disqualified. So on 27th of September 2015 at Maardu we had our first competition (judge Inga Järv) where we managed to run all three courses without DSQ. Only problem was, that we dropped too many bars and did some other mistakes like false slalom entrys and probably something else. Results were not promising (places were 6th, 8th, 15th).
A month later we went again to Maardu and did a competition without DSQ's. This time the judge was Svetlana Kreslina and the courses were pretty good and slightly difficult in some parts. Again, we had many faults (mostly bars) and our places in the three courses were 6th, 8th and 11th.