The Awesome AKC Nationals Wrapup

We are back from our trip to Reno for the AKC Agility Nationals, and what a great trip it was!

Skye ran clean in 4 out of 5 runs, with just a missed AFrame contact in our warm-up Standard run on Friday. Overall, out of the 235 20" dogs entered, we finished in 29th place! My goal for nationals was to run clean and try and finish in the top 20%, and we sure accomplished that.

Our run order for Friday was 198th, as well as our first run on Saturday, so we had a long time to wait and watch.

Here are the videos in the order that we ran:

Warmup Standard - just getting out on the equipment. Nice run though my peel-off from the AFrame caused a jumped contact.



Later in the day we ran Time 2 Beat. The winner of Time 2 Beat got a bye into the Challengers round, so we saw a lot of competitors really going for it. There was a weave entry that surprisingly caught a lot of dogs. The judges were being real particular about calling the teeter, not giving anyone any leeway, so we saw quite a few called for their teeter as well. A wrap jump at obstacle 11 allowed for those with efficient turns to make up a faster time - lots of dogs went very wide on the wrap. Skye ended up about 5.5 seconds behind the fastest dog, but it was a very good run, probably around 70th place out of the 235 dogs.



The first day of 'real' nationals competition started with a JWW run. I felt like this was a pretty straightforward course. There were a few ways people decided to handle the opening, but generally it ran well and there weren't any consistent trouble spots for those I watched. I believe about 150 dogs qualified on this course. Skye was around 107th - I definitely felt like Skye could have run this course about 2 seconds faster.



The second run on Saturday was Standard. This course had a few interesting traps. The start again had handlers pretty split as to how to handle it. It was 2 jumps in a 180 - seems like half the people stayed on the side I did, and the other half lead out to the #2 and then pushed to #3. After the turn at 4, I saw a lot of dogs drive straight to the offcourse triple jump. Then, off the aframe, we took an arc that brought you over the triple into the tunnel, and I saw quite a few dogs drive to the panel jump instead, and some were able to save that offcourse, only to end up with the wrong end of the tunnel due to the dogs' line. The dogwalk contact was called a lot, due to handlers pealing off for the weaves. Finally, the sequence after the weaves got a lot of people as the jumps were not in line and caused a lot of problems. I think Skye should have run this probably 2 - 3 seconds faster than he did. I felt like he was not giving it his all in this one.
After 2 rounds, we were in 49th place.



Finally we had the Hybrid class - like a Standard but no dogwalk or chute. The beginning of this course was very controlled and gave a lot of people problems. The way the jumps were setup, a lot of handlers got lost and sent their dogs over the wrong jump. We had to run this in 'ring 4' which was a crappy, crowded, dark room that also housed the indoor stall crating area. Nobody liked this building and I hope if they run a nationals here again, they figure out the lighting and how to set this ring up so it isn't so tight. This was a pretty good run for us - I don't think Skye really could have done this too much faster for me.
Our cumulative placement was 29th - though I watched the board and we were listed as Finalists for quite a long time. They took 17 dogs to finals. Our cumulative time was 98.814 seconds. The cutoff to make finals ended up being 87.64 seconds, so we were 12 seconds off the finals pace. Not sure we can train for that much more speed, so we will leave the finals for all those crazy fast dogs :)



My final thoughts are that the Reno facility was very nice. The food and drinks were way overpriced. The city of Reno is pretty dumpy with homeless looking people hanging out all over the place. Their gas prices are too high. The entire state of Wyoming should just be covered in windmills - I am sure they could produce enough electricity for the entire country.

It was a lot of fun, and I hope I can qualify both Rip and Skye for next year's Nationals to be held in Tulsa, OK!