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Wednesday, April 4, 2012

2012 AKC Agility Nationals

Wow what a weekend! This was my first Nationals of any venue where I was running just Enzo. It was nice to be able to focus on him. We had been struggling a bit lately. I have been having trouble keeping on course with him. Monday my instructer Stephanie Spyr gave me some good advice and it helped a lot! I also realized that it takes an extremely high level of concentration on my part to run Enzo well and most of the time I just don't get to that level. Running 5 straight runs clean just doesn't ever normally happen for us.


Friday morning was the warmup standard run. Enzo was awesome and nailed all of his contacts which gave me some more confidence for the rest of the weekend. It didn't count for anything but we placed third! Then Friday afternoon was Time to Beat. The winner of this round would get an spot in the challengers round. Enzo had a solid run and placed 6th.

Time 2 beat vid coming soon.

So it was an awesome first day for Enzo. Saturday the real Nationals runs started. Saturday morning was Round 1, Jumpers with Weaves. It was a pretty straightforward course with a few areas where I had to be careful not to lose him off course. Enzo had a really good run that was clean! He ended up in 14th place which was a solid placement. Top 10 in the 16" division would make it into the finals and there were about 140 dogs.


Round 2 was the standard course. This is where Enzo's running contacts can give him an advantage. There were 90 degrees turns off of both the dogwalk and aframe but at least there was no off course possibility after the dogwalk which judges seem to like to do lately. Enzo had a really awesome run and placed 5th in this round. That was probably good enough to at least get him into the challengers round if at least one of the dogs that placed ahead of him in this round were clean for all 3. His cumulative placement for the two rounds at this point was 8th!


Sunday morning was Round 3, the Hybrid course which is basically a jumpers course plus a teeter and an aframe. This was definitely the hardest course of the weekend. Enzo had some pretty wide turns when he was looking at all the off course choices. After the teeter, he almost took the wrong jump straight ahead but called off at the last second. Scary! I thought for sure he was going to take it. We made it clean through the course and stayed in 8th place to make it into the finals! I had looked at the challengers course in the morning and decided that I really didn't want to run that course so it gave me some extra incentive to stay clean. Otherwise, I've always thought that it would be fun to run in the Challengers round.


The finals course looked fun and didn't look as difficult on paper as it ran. I was pretty excited going into the finals and so was Enzo. I got a little too excited in the weave and left too abruptly which pulled him out of the weaves. After that I just decided to run hard and have fun with it. That of course made Enzo wild and he launched off the dog walk and teeter and made a lot of wide turns but he got to run fast. I was just really happy to make it there! Very proud of the little boy!

3 comments:

Nicole said...

you guys did really well :)
I got a couple of photos of Enzo during finals if you'd like them!

AgileAussies said...

Thanks! I'd love the pics of Enzo! My email is my blogger user name @yahoo.com

Furrari said...

To quote from Sarah, Aaaaaagggghh!!