Here’s a compilation of all of Enzo’s runs for the weekend.

First off, Jenn will surely do a better post on AKC Invitationals including videos, but I thought I’d do a quick post. She and Enzo were awesome. On Saturday, they had the fastest times in both standard and jumpers. Enzo dropped a bar in the standard run but was clean in the jumpers. That means Jenn and Enzo both got their first ever 1st place finish at a national championship! Congrats to both! On Sunday they had a few mistakes so weren’t able to finish at the top in either run.

Tooney is also doing really well after several months of recovering from her mysterious left leg injury (still not known exactly what it was). After lots of rehab and love, she is starting to play frisbee again, so that is really exciting. We’re taking it super slow with her. It’s been about 5 months since we started resting and rehab. She is free to run around with Enzo and isn’t wearing a brace anymore. She is currently running down about 7-10 throws in the 10-15 yard range. I’ve got a good feeling that she will be able to make the 1st frisbee competition of the year in March.

Jenn and I are talking about what to do for agility. Jenn thinks that if Tooney is able to do agility, maybe bring her back just for her last AKC finals (in Virginia). She is already qualified, so she could just do some warm up and practice leading to the competition. It would be a good way to retire her from agility. The thought is that maybe if she retires from agility, she could play frisbee longer. We believe the frisbee play will be less demanding on her body. Maybe she could move down to the 12″ jump division in AKC and continue to do some jumpers or fast courses there. We are mostly worried about her A-frame. It’s awesome to watch how she lands half way down the down side, but we think it is probably too rough on the front of her body.

To say the least, I’m excited about Tooney’s progress. I have a feeling that she is going to be back 100% playing frisbee in a couple of months. It’s a big turn around from when we saw no progress for weeks and weeks at a time.

Jenn and Enzo are going to compete at the AKC Agility Invitationals. They competed a whole year earning points towards the Invitational. Their hard work paid off and they are going into the finals as the #3 ranked Australian Shepherd team. I am super proud of them and can’t wait to see them compete this weekend.

Jenny – I want you to think about it this way. The year you spent competing and qualifying for the Invitational was the real journey. You’ve already reached the goal. This weekend is just bonus and you guys have earned it. Enzo will surely go out and have pure fun and do what he does best. Following your lead, run fast and jump a lot. I am sure you will have fun watching your little multitalented gifted atheletic intense superstar rock the joint, whether he wins or not. Was that enough adjectives to describe Enzo? Not really… fantastic, exciting and jumpy-mcjumpenstein are a few more. Oh yeah – you’re not too shabby yourself.

I entered Enzo in two days of the 3 day Thanksgiving weekend trial. Last weekend to practice before the invitational. The first run on Friday was standard and it was a train wreck! He was totally wild and kind of doing his own thing. My main concern was him blowing his dogwalk contact off the start but his teeter was good and aframe kind of borderline but he got it. His JWW was good though and he got first place. He was still pretty amped up and I felt like I was just barely holding on. Probably a side effect of not getting worked enough lately by either me or Jeff. It’s hard when it gets dark so early.

Sunday’s Standard went much better. His contacts were all solid and he was paying attention. He had a blazing fast run and got first place. There were a couple wraps and he turned tight on them. I think he had the fastest time of all the heights too. He did break his startline right before I released him which should have been a hint to me in JWW.

So in JWW I was planning on leading out to tthe 3rd jump and doing a lead out pivot but enzo went when I was halfway between the 2nd and 3rd jump. I tried to do a running front cross and he knocked the triple (2nd jump) and then pulled into the wrong end of the tunnel which I was too far behind for. I was happy with the rest of the run though. I just need to be aware that I may not have a long leadout at the invitational. At Nationals they usually try to design courses that don’t allow for long leadouts because it makes the day go faster so hopefully that’s the case for Invitational too!

Well the rest of the week is going to be contact practice, some stay practice and maybe some lateral weave practice!

Here’s Enzo’s JWW run from Saturday. This was our only clean run from the weekend. Enzo got 1st place.

San Diego hosted the 2010 UFO World Cup Finals and we were well prepared and super excited to compete in this event. We had competitors from Germany and Netherlands as well as all over the U.S. It ran from Friday into Sunday and there seemed to be round after round after round of competition. I think about 10 total rounds. Enzo and I were both exhausted at the end of the day Sunday. There were ups and downs for Enzo and I as a team, but my best buddy managed to pull out a solid round every time he needed to.

Friday was an open qualifier that Enzo needed to do well to get points for the season championship. Enzo was AWESOME! I was so proud of him. He did great in both freestyle and toss/fetch. Our best freestyle round is the first video below with one of the top scores for the day. His toss/fetch round was the 6th best out of over 50 teams! So much for toss/fetch being his weakeness! That is long behind us. Now he’s solid on both. He finished 5th overall and gained lots of points. He moved from #25 in the world to #12 after the day was over.

Saturday and Sunday were the World Cup Finals. Only competitors who qualified with a minimum number of points from the entire season can compete. About 50 teams qualified in the world and a total of 21 showed up. Most of the people in the top 20 came to compete. Scores from Saturday carry over into Sunday and after 1 round Sunday, the top 10 move on to the last rounds as the finalists. I felt it was going to be very difficult to make the top 10, but that was our goal. We would have to beat half of the best competitors around. Our placement moved around a lot during the rounds. Our placement from the 1st round to last (before the top 10) went as follows: 11 (yes, we are in it) 19 (uh oh) 12 (back in it) 10 (JUST made it!!!). We made 10th place by 0.1 points. With total score on the order of 100+, it was as close as it gets! After we made the cut, it felt good to be a finalist. In the top 10 round, we had a good freestyle and toss/fetch round and moved up 2 more places and finished in 8th!!!

The scores from the weekend are added to our point total for the entire season and we finished at #8 in the UFO World Cup standings! Click here to see our name in the final rankings!!!

Videos can be watched HD up to 1080p!

Here’s videos of our two best rounds. 2nd video has us in our Halloween attire.

Here are the remaining freestyle rounds:

Enzo got his 40th double Q this past Saturday for his MACH2. He’s such an awesome little boy. Unfortunately I didn’t think to bring my video camera. He had a fast and smooth jumpers run where we had to go through some scary boxes (our old weakness) and a nice standard run with a small bobble when I had to call him off of the off course aframe.

Last weekend we went to one day of an ASCA trial. He needed one more Regular leg for his Open title. At our last ASCA trial I entered him in Open and we didn’t Q in either of our regular runs so I decided to just enter him in Elite for this trial. We didn’t Q in Elite Gamblers but he Q’d in both Elite Regular runs with the fastest time of all heights and also Q’d and got 1st in Elite Jumpers. So he finished his RS-O and got an Elite Regular and Elite Jumpers leg. Now we’re ready to try for the 2012 ASCA Agility finals in Bakersfield. Hopefully they’ll have some more ASCA trials than they normally do around here.

Then there are my frustrations with USDAA. We did a USDAA trial a couple weeks, 9 runs and only two Q’s. He had a bar in almost every run and was also having problems making his contacts with the higher aframe and the shorter dogwalk contact. His only Q’s were in Masters Pairs and Snookers. He could have gotten a Super Q if not for the knocked #6 jump in Snoookers. Not sure if I should do performance with him instead. That would at least take care of the bars and the higher aframe but the dogwalk would still be an issue. I really would like him to run in championship for a little while though since i think he’s actually fast enough to be competitive if we could just be consistent.