Gryphon and I flew out of Sacramento at 6:45 this morning and after an uneventful flight, arrived in Minneapolis at noon. We met up with our friend, Val Rutledge, at the airport. We are sharing a room and car again this year. In addition to being a good friend, Val will also be Gryphon’s massage therapist throughout the weekend (she does this for a number of the competitors. I just have the advantage of sharing a room with her so I never have to hunt her down to get him worked on!). We come in a day early in order to get all settled, lay in groceries and do any other errands we want before getting down to work tomorrow.

After checking into our motel, we went out to find exactly where the event site is this year. In every other year since the inception of tryouts (save one), the competition has always been held at the Hopkins arena, in Hopkins, MN (nearer to Minneapolis than St Paul where we are this year). We all knew where the motels were, where the good restaurants, grocery stores, etc, were all located. But this year, the World Championships are being held on dirt instead of carpet or other artificial surface. So, Coach Nancy Gyes wanted tryouts to be held on a similar surface. So, we have a new site. Our motel, a renovated train maintenance complex, is a nice Best Western only about 3 miles from the site. Our room is a good size one that opens into the pool area.

After finding the site, it was time for lunch. We found a Whole Foods and took care of both lunch and groceries! After one more quick stop at a Cub Grocery for a few more mundane things we couldn’t get at Whole Foods, we headed back the motel and settled in for the night. Of course, that’s when we realized the down side to having a poolside room – there are about 30 kids out screaming and playing in the pool area. Fortunately, 9 pm is the closing time for kids and things should quiet down in about 30 minutes!
Tomorrow things kick off with practice at the site. As happens in Europe, each competitor gets a set amount of time on the floor an the actual equipment that will be used in the competition so all the dogs are on even footing, all having had a chance to get the feel for the weight of the chute, the tip of the teeter, and the grip of the footing. After practice, we will draw for our initial running order in round 1. Small dogs, which is Gryphon’s division, have 25 dogs entered; the Medium are about the same, and the large dogs have 35 entered. After round 1, the running order changes in each round. More on this and the way the scoring works tomorrow.

The Challenge round is unique to AKC Nationals. It where a few lucky
dogs and hanlders get a second shot at making it into the finals. Its a
complicated process, but trying to put it simply: for each round, they
take the top placing dogs, remove any from the list that are already in
the finals, and then the next 4 dogs get a shot. That makes a possible
total of 12 dogs per jump height getting a chance to compete for one
spot in the finals. Usually, the Challenge round can be much more
exciting than the finals because almost all the dogs in the Challenge
rounds are top dogs who had one bobble. To get to the challenge round,
dogs must have two clean rounds. They must also go clean in the
Challenge round because to get into the finals, dogs must have 3 clear
rounds.

It was very exciting to watch. In my opinion the most exciting dog of
the day was a big rat terrier named Dylan. He outran all the shelties
and BCs in that 16″ class. He eventually also won the 16″ class in
spectacular fashion.

You can get all the details about the Nationals finals off the AKC website.

This year was also the first Preferred National Championship. I had
originally felt this was a good idea, but after watching so many
geriatric dogs struggle around the course, I have to change my opinion.
Yes, there were many Preferred dogs who did just fine, but there were
many others who should not have been there. I find it too bad that
handlers put their ego over the well being of their dogs. Despite the
fact that the dogs appear to like running still, we have the opposable
thumbs and must make the decision that is best for our older dogs and
retire them when it becomes clear that agility is a struggle for them.
One of the hardest things I ever had to do in agility was to retire
Heather out of competition when she obviously still enjoyed running.
But she had an unstable knee and a heart murmur. So, odds were, it wold
only be a matter of time before she injured herself. As I do not have
the veterinary background to see things like this, I depended on Dr.
Wallace to tell me when it was time and, when she told me, I followed
her advice. Heather and I found other things to do together. I
sincerely hope some of these handlers will watch their runs and make a
similar decision.

Even worse than the Preferred Nationals was the Preferred Final Round.
Due to a administrative error/decision, way more Preferred dogs went to
the Finals than should have. So, the audience was subjected to over an
hour of Preferred dogs running the Finals course. Some of these were
fine, however, many were not. The stands, that started off packed,
eventually emptied as people got bored with the runs and went and found
something else to do. At one point, I looked behind me and saw a woman
fast asleep with her sheltie in her lap. That’s how exciting the
Preferred Finals were. It was very sad to see what was supposed to be a
good addition to the National Championships become a painful display of
old dogs struggling to regain past glory.

One of the high points of our day was when we saw the 20″ finals. Pat
White’s golden Bob ended up #20 out of 298 dogs! Pretty amazing
considering probably 80 percent of those were BCs! Unfortunately, they
only took the top 18 to the finals. Drat! But, Pat also found that
Bob was the Top Scoring Golden of the weekend! Pretty impressive for a
dog with bionic hips! Congratulations to Bob and Pat!

Other significant results:
Marcy Mantell won the 12″ Class! She had placed 2nd back in 2007 in
Ohio, but today was her day. She had an absolutely spectacular Finals
round.
Terry LeClair placed 4th in the 16″ class
Channon Fosty placed 2nd in the 26″ class
Sharon Frielich was a 20″ Finalist
Dorothy Fujimura was a 12″ Challenge round competitor

Karen Kaua and her little papillon Milton ran 5 clear rounds over the 3
days of competition here, a feat not many dogs achieve! Way to go Karen!

We celebrated the end of Nationals with a good meal at the Cheesecake
Factory, then home to the hotel to pack, relax and get ready for the
trip home tomorrow. Hopefully it will stay dry enough for classesthis
week. If so, see most of you at class on Tue and Wed.

Today started the actual National Championship competition. There are 5
rounds to the Championships, although not all dogs run every round. All
dogs do run the first 3 rounds: one standard round; one JWW round; and
one Hybrid round that is a cross between those two.

In Round 1 today, Gryphon had a brilliant start but dropped the bar at
jump 3 (he was not alone–lots of dogs did this); he was expecting a
right turn and I turned him left, giving him the information too late,
causing the bar to fall. After that, he did give me a solid teeter, but
thing went downhill from there. I will have to wait until I get my
videos of the runs, but it was obvious I was not giving him the
information he needed fast enough to make correct choices. He took off
course options two different times–something he hasn’t done for
awhile! There were very good parts to his run, but just the same, we
ended up with and “E” for that round. Round 2, the JWW round, was
better. We had a very good start but I was one step too late to make a
front cross and so had to hit the brakes hard to avoid sending him off
course. I was then off my plan, so had to start making it up as I went
along! But we persevered and ended up with a clear round.

Others from our area attending:
Pat White and Bob had two clear rounds
Karen Kaua and her papillion Milton had two clear rounds
Marcy Mantell and her sheltie Wave had two clear rounds today; one
first, one third
Dorothy Fujimura and her sheltie Piper had two clear rounds
Terry LeClair and his BC Heather had two clear rounds
Channon Fosty and her BC Icon had two clear rounds
Nancy Gyes and her BC Ace had tow faulted rounds, bars in both I think
Laura Jones and her BC Kep took fourth in the 26″ JWW class and a bar in
the Std class
Robert Yi and Cap, the defending 24″ champion, had at least one clear round
Sandy Rogers and her PRT Quill, had one clear round and one off course
Kelly Chaffin and her golden Charlie had two faulted rounds, bars
Sharon Freilich is also here with two of her BCs, Scandal and ??, but
I’m not sure how she ran today.

With four rings running at the same time, one being in a separate
building, its tough to keep up with what’s going on!

There is some great agility going on and lots of great dogs.

They did announce that tentatively, next year’s AKC Nationals will be
held in Perry Georgia (about 90 minutes from Atlanta) and that they are
trying to identify 3 places around the country to hold this event: one
east, one central, and one west. No more details were announced.

Tomorrow we run the hybrid round. Gryphon and I will have to turn in a
stellar in order to have a chace to get into the Challenge round.

The Challenge round gives dogs who have had two out of 3 clear rounds,
and one faulted round who have placed high enough on more shot at a
chanc to make the finals. They will take up to 8 dogs in each jump
height and those dogs face off in a winner take all chance to gain entry
into the finals. The Challenge round is frequently more exciting then
the finals!

This has been a tough trip for Gryphon and me from the agility side. The travel here was fine. We flew from Sacramento to Dallas to meet up with Pat and Kelly on Wed. We spent the night with Kelly’s family at their home in Burleson. After being well taken care of for the evening, we got on the road the next day about 10:00 and arrived in Tulsa around 3:30 pm. We headed over to the site to set up and check in. The site is the Tulsa State Fairgrounds Expo Center and is an amazing site. We are using two of the smaller arenas. The main arena holds Rings 1-3 and an adjacent arena is for ring 4. We are crating in the stall area which affords us privacy and the dogs some quiet, away from the hustle of the rings and, more importantly, away from the general public. Bob and Charlie share an expen while Gryphon and Karen Kaua’s papillion Milton are each safetly tucked in their individual crates. Although Gryphon has shared an expen with Bob and Charlie at shows at home, for some reason here he didn’t seem comfortable, so I thought it best to give him his own space.

Each morning starts very early. Gryphon is lucky enough to get a great warm up massage from Valerie Rutledge, a great canine masseuse from Florida at 8:00 am each morning, so he is all ready to go. The course maps are available for pick up very early: 6:00 this morning and that is followed by a 15 minute general walkthrough. There are almost 1000 dogs entered here this weekend. Divide by 4 rings and you can see that the general walkthroughs are pretty crowded. The 20″ class alone has about 290 dogs in it. The 12’s have almost 200. After the genral walk through, there is a general hanlder’s briefing and that is followed by timed walkthroughs.

Friday was the State Team Tournament/International Sweepstakes Class. The State Team Tournamnt is where the scores from each dog from each state are tracked and the state with the best 4 scores wins!. In years past when the event was not as large, the Tournament ended with a final round where the top 5 states would have a final round, going head to head. But this year the entry was too large and there just wasn’t enough time. California has always been one of the top 5 teams, but never managed to pull out a win in the head to head round. However with the new formate, California won the Tournament!

The International Sweepstakes Class is where dogs interested in competing for a spot on the AKC Team that rpresents the US at the FCI Wold Championships in Europe have a chance to run head to head. Instead of jumping the normal AKC heights, there are 3 FCI heights (well, one is an AKC height): 14, 18 and 26. The 3 jump heights compete for an invitation to the Team Tryouts that are held every year in May.

(to be continued)

http://www.akc.org/events/agility/national_agility_championship/

I had been playing with Shout and Gryphon and had just stopped Gryphon’s participation in the game because I didn’t want him to get tired out or injured. I gave the toy one last toss for Shout and Gryphon attempted to run after it. He hit the end of his leash, and fell back to the ground, hitting very awkwardly. When he stood up, he was on 3 legs, not bearing any weight on his left rear leg. He did not walk out of the injury, so we packed up and with the help of other campers, found a local vet who could see him immediately. After an exam and a couple X-rays, we got the bad news: torn ACL. I was devastated.

Even if the diagnosis was not 100 percent correct, he was very lame at the least. So, we packed up and headed back to the motel. I decided to cut one of my favoriate road trips of the year short in order to get home, have our own vet check him out and get him on the road to recovery.

We fly out tomorrow at 2:00 pm and will be home by about 7:30 if all goes well. We have an appointment with our vet on Wed at noon. We’ll know more after that, but there is a good chance he will have to undergo surgery to repair the damage. Given what his life is, we cannot play around with this. So, we will do what is best for him. I’ll let everyone know what we find out as we know them.

Yesterday was a very long travel day. It started at 3:45 am CA time and ended at 1:30 AM FL time. I made the decision to bring not only Gryphon with me this year, but also Shout got to come along for the experience. And, because I didn’t want to put either dog down below, I had asked my friend Shirley Harris to come along with us to carry the second dog which she generously agreed to. She’ll be auditing both camps. So, we arrived at Sac Int’l at 5:30 am Sat morning for our 7:20 flight on Southwest. It was a two leg flight (or so we thought at the time) with a quick change in Phoenix. The first flight went smoothly (at least it did after the flight attendent politely asked us to move from the aisle seat because the Sturdi-bag dog carrier couldn’t be tucked in far enough. She was very nice about it. So we slid over. It was a short flight down to Phoenix. We had left Sacramento about 15 minutes late and we didn’t have much time to begin with. But they made up time and we landed in Phoenix only about 5 minutes behind schedule. As we deplaned and checked our time, we had plenty, so we walked to our next gate and I thought I’d get something to eat since its a long day and Southwest doesn’t offer aything other than a really minimum snack. So before leaving the gate area, I checked with the counter only to discover that we were about to board!! Where I though we had plenty of time, it turns out we barely made our boarding. Totally forgot that this time of year there is an hour time change between Sacramento and Phoenix!! So, we made it just as our boarding number came up. Then, as we got settled on the plane, the flight attendent announced that the plane was going to Tampa. Tampa??? Turns out this flight had one stop we didn’t know about before we went to Jacksonville. We had wondered about the very long flight time from Phoenix, but didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. So, after a brief stop we headed to Jacksonville. Arrived at about 6:00 pm to a cool, but dry evening.

This was Shout’s first airplane ride since she came home at 10 weeks. Knowing she doesn’t like loud mechanical sounds, I wasn’t sure how she would react to the sounds of the aircraft: engines spooling up on take off, thrust reversers screaming on landing…. and as we all know, she isn’t shy about letting us know how she feels (she definitely lives up to her name). But she did fine. She was a little restless on takeoff and landing, but otherwise she was OK.

We loaded up the car and headed down the road for the 3 hour drive to Sebastian where our motel is located. We fly into Jacksonville because its the closest airport to the second camp and makes getting home easier. We could have flown into Melbourne, FL, which is only about 45 min from the first camp and left out of Jax, but that would increase the rental car cost by about $200. I figured I didn’tneed to spend that much when its a very easy drive: straight down I-95 for 3 hours, then a few turns and we’re there.

We made the obligatory Wal Mart stop last night to pick up a few supplies for breakfast and lunch today. Our motel is a little apartment with a kitchen, so we can avoid eating out every day. We moved in and then took the dogs for a run at a park right across from the motel and then finally got the lights out about 1:30.

This morning, we managed to get up about 7:30 and are puttering around until we are awake enough to head to the trial. The trial site is only about 15 minutes from the motel. Will post more tonite. I am really looking forward to working with the instructors at this camp: Jen Pinder (who will also be out teaching for me later in March); Ann Braue from Wisconsin; and Karen Holik from Florida. I’ve worked with them all before and, although all 3 of them follow the Linda Mecklenburg system of handling, I haven’t had any trouble working with them and am looking forward to the next 3 days.