If you do sports on a regular basis with your dogs, it’s very important to regulate their activity levels during training and competitions. Know their limits and be smart about what you let them do. A perfect example is Tooney at our AWI qualifier this year. She had a good freestyle round and a great toss/fetch. It put her around 7th place overall and in the top 10 for toss/fetch, too… She made the cut for 2nd round in both freestyle and toss/fetch. That is all well and good, but I know that after Tooney’s injury last year and her physical abilities that doing 2 more rounds would be too much. Could she do it? Yes. Would it be risky? In my mind it was. Even if she didn’t get hurt, it would very likely wear her down a lot and she would then end up running her last round probably feeling like I was forcing or pushing her to. Unfortunately, at every competition I see people who should make this same decision but they don’t. They go out there and in the last round, the dog doesn’t want to compete, walks off the field, etc. It’s supposed to be fun. If your dog is leaving the field or showing ANY indication they don’t want to play, then you aren’t listening to them and you’re forcing them to do something they don’t want to do. How do you think that will pan out in the long run?

Jenn and I asked if we could see the scores in the freestyle to see how far from making the top 5 qualifying spots she was. We decided if we felt she could move up a couple of spots that it would be worth it to do the freestyle and scratch the toss/fetch round. She had to pass 2 dogs that would certainly get much higher freestyle scores than her. She was close to them only on the strength of her toss/fetch round. We scratched her from freestyle and continued with her in the toss/fetch round. It was a pretty smart decision because she was only 1 point out of making the top 3 in the toss/fetch. She ended up 4th place, so that was great!

By doing this and making the decision ahead of time, it allowed the organizers to have the next highest scoring team that didn’t make the cut originally to make the cut after our decision.

I am super proud of her as she had a great day. It’s not very often you will see a competitor scratch a dog from the freestyle round simply because they felt it would be too much for their dog, but it goes to show how much we love the little T-bean and we try to do what is best for her.

Enzo won the 2011 AWI Southern California qualifier! Very proud of him! Tooney was probably near placing in the toss/fetch portion of the event, but I didn’t see the final placements yet.

We also competed in a UFO major 2 weeks ago and did OK. We didn’t place, but Enzo and Tooney had lots of fun.

11/23/1997 – 5/3/2011

We already miss you, Beeb.

So not much energy or time for computer stuff with Slayte in the house. I have all kinds of videos on the camera right now. AKC Nationals and a bunch of frisbee videos. Dunno when I’ll get to posting them! Starting to teach Slayte a few things. He’s not real into his dog food so it’s hard to get him to work for it much. I don’t want to fill him up on treats. Luckily he’s smart and picks up on things pretty quickly. He’ll offer sit and down but haven’t gotten to the point where I want to put it on cue. Working on Leave It or it’s yer choice or whatever you want to call it. Have him getting on the balance disc and on the little travel board. He learned the tunnel by watching the other dogs. I just taught him to do it when I ask yesterday which was pretty easy. He’s a funny little guy. He loves toys and tugging but his attention span isn’t very good. He will chase rollers with the puppy discs but he won’t pick up the plastic discs. He does fast restrained recalls to food and toys. Oh and he’s growing like a weed! I think my next project will be to clicker train a retrieve.

Seems like he might turn out friendlier than Enzo but I guess that time will tell on that one.

Love this pup! He’s bonkers but lots of fun and super sweet. Lots of toy drive and tons of energy! Hard to keep up with him. Only bad thing is he screams at night in his crate so not getting much sleep.

Saturday’s JWW was a really tough course for Enzo. Fast lines with lots of off course opportunities. Basically had to make sure to use a lot of deceleration cues so couldn’t let him run all out. It was quite scary to run him on that course and he was turning wide and looking at everything. We made it through clean though! yay! I think he ended up around 25th place. Then I ran Tooney and she did really well but unfortunate I used too much deceleration for her in one part where there was an off course tunnel option and she knocked a bar. Basically I handled her like Enzo. Ergh.

Standard was another kind of icky course. It had a horrible dogwalk exit for running dogwalks. Basically there were 3 jumps next to each other and they had to take the middle jump and not the one straight ahead. For Enzo I decided to do a front cross at the end of the dogwalk and then a rear cross on the next jump. I figured that was the only way to make sure that he didn’t take that off course jump. If I pulled him, I figured it would be 50/50 whether that would work or not. He broke his startline so I was a little late on the front cross and he almost flipped into the tunnel next to the dogwalk but other than that we got through that part. Then he was flying towards the teeter so I yelled wait at him as he neared the end and he did! Good boy! I rear crossed the next jump and he didn’t read a tight enough turn to the chute and I lost him to an off course jump. I really wish I had that course back again… If I had said something to him sooner I could have easily saved that.

Then Tooney ran the standard course and ran clean. I easily pulled her off the dogwalk and she was with me through the whole course. She ended up around 20th I think.

So Hybrid with Enzo was my last chance to maybe make Challengers round. The course was really a good course for him. One where he could keep a lot of speed. He had an awesome opening and then probably lost around 1 second when he shot off in the wrong direction. He still had a pretty good time so I had to wait and see if it was good enough to make the Challengers round.

Tooney had a really solid Hybrid Round. I didn’t have any expectations for Tooney this nationals. I was just really happy that she could run again and didn’t want to push her too hard or anything. I was really happy to see that she actually would have made finals if not for that darn bar! We took her shopping after her run which she really loves.

So Enzo ended up 13th in Hybrid so not high enough to make it to challengers. But still a pretty good placement especially considered the lost time. Too bad since that Challenges course looked like it would have been fun to run with him. Finally a dogwalk exit that didn’t want to make my head explode. Ha!

Good thing is that Enzo’s running contacts really help up well this weekend. They seem to actually be becoming solid! amazing! Over the next year I’ll be able to learn more about how to handle his contacts and what works and what doesn’t and we should be more prepared for the next Nationals. Maybe if I hadn’t been obsessing over the dogwalk in Standard I would have noticed that off course option.

Well one more week and we’ll be home with Slayte! Skyhoundz Southeast Regional this weekend. Just for fun since we aren’t from the southeast.