Here’s everything from the Midwest Agility Open that was held on Oct. 22nd. Results and course map from Round 1 are here. Results and course map from Round 2 are here. Results and course map from Round 3 are here. Results and course map from Round 4 are here. Final, combined results are here. YouTube live stream recording #1 is here. YouTube live stream recording #2 is here. It was a fabulous day to do agility […]
Well, this finally happened. At 5.5 years old we finally achieved our MACH title under a Malinois judge no less! We’ve been chipping away at it over the years, but due to not trialing in AKC a lot it’s been slow going. This year, though, she’s been on fire. A big cause for that is probably because I dropped her to 24″ this year instead of the 26″ that I had been jumping her at […]
I’ve felt for quite a while now that it doesn’t feel like agility in America is advancing at a pace that other parts of the world seem to be advancing. My experiences competing overseas just amplifies that feeling I have. The courses, the atmosphere, the mentality all seem to be at a different level in this country compared to Europe. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that as the demographics and audience in America are […]
The 2016 European Open that just concluded marked the 3rd time that Luna and I have traveled to Europe to compete at the event. The event is probably the largest agility event being held currently. While it is not the most prestigious event I believe it is by far the hardest event to compete at and actually medal in. Just the sheer number of competitors means that anything can happen. On top of that, all […]
On May 7th-9th, in San Jose, CA the American Kennel Club held their annual World Team Tryouts in order to select the 12 teams to represent the AKC and the USA at the Agility World Championship. 87 teams from around the country made the trek to California in order to try and be one of the teams selected for this prestigious team. This will be the 20th year that the AKC has fielded a team to […]
At the recently completed 2016 IFCS WAC the last full course Luna and I ran was the biathlon jumping course on Sunday. It was a clean run for us and good enough to be 8th fastest which helped us finish 7th overall in the biathlon event. However, when I looked at the times of the dogs above me, the top dogs were a full 2 seconds faster than Luna and I. After watching our run […]
Today is Dog Agility Blog Action Day and the topic we are going to be discussing is FUN. Three little letters and a concept easy to grasp most of the time, but often times so difficult to achieve in training or trialing. Instead of writing about fun games to play in training with your dog or fun things to do at trials I want to talk about my journey to having fun in agility so […]
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post Gamblers is always a course that I have to worry about if it matters for something. Some of the joker challenges are definitely doable for us, but then there are some that are definitely a challenge. Over the next 2 months I really need to be working on these distance challenges so that we will be better prepared for what we face in The Netherlands in April. Our biggest challenge in […]
Since I haven’t posted a lot here recently, I thought I’d do a recap of recent goings on. There are 4 major international events every year that we may or may not target depending on timing. For AKC/FCI, we have the European Open (EO) and the Agility World Championship (AWC). For USDAA/IFCS there is the IFCS World Agility Championship. Finally, for UKI there is the World Agility Open (WAO). Each of the U.S. agility organizations […]
I was fortunate enough to run across an incredible agility instructor early on in my agility career that has benefited me tremendously over the years. Her expert eye and no nonsense attitude meshed well with my learning style and I am where I’m at because of her. For a lot of competitors they may not ever find that instructor or may not find them until many years after they’ve been competing. Over the past couple […]