We are now home from our big east coast trip. Our first stop of the trip was in Youngsville, NC. Jeff gave a disc dog seminar there and we got to finally meet Brett(Muse’s Breeder) in person plus other extended doggy family members, Sara and Rave and Katherine and Skye. It was a lot of fun and I’m sure Jeff will talk more about the seminar. For now I am skipping to AKC Nationals.

First it was really cold in Pennsylvania! Glad we moved. The first night there was brutal. Slayte ended up with bad diarrhea the first night there so we didn’t get much sleep. He had an accident in the RV right after we went to bed. Thursday morning I fed him just a little bit of freeze dried pumpkin and water and he threw that up.

Thursday, I ran Enzo first in T2B. He was having a great run until the teeter where he got called for the contact and then I rushed the weave entrance and he ran past it. Next was Slayte’s T2B run. I was worried he wouldn’t run like himself or that he’d poop on the course! No need to worry, he was his normally pushy self and broke the startline. That caused me to be out of position and a bar down but good news was that he was fast and happy to run. Next he ran JWW. There was a big choice to turn left or right at the 3rd jump. Right was a hard lead change for the dog and left was considered safer and smoother for the dog. I picked safer but still messed it up. I probably should have trusted Slayte’s physical ability to make those difficult lead changes. The right turn would have been more logical for him. He was pretty amped up though so who knows.

Friday was Enzo’s JWW run. He had a really fast run but took down two bars. His time would have put him in about 8th place. Here is the video from that run.

Slayte ran standard and we had a few faults. He had a bar down, missed the aframe contact, and I pulled him off of a jump that I didn’t support enough. He did well with the tricky part at the end though.

Saturday’s standard course was bad news for Enzo and his running dogwalk. There was a 180 turn back to the chute after the dw and an off course jump sitting straight ahead. Enzo did a flying leap off the DW and went right over the off course jump. I’m definitely over the running DW but not going to change it again for him at this point in his career. Slayte’s Hybrid run was his last chance for a clean run at his first nationals. I really wanted to make that happen so I could see how he compares to the other dogs in the 20″ class. I could tell that it was a good course for him. He was the 453rd dog to run so I had time to watch a lot of dogs run throughout the day. I knew that anything in the 28s range was fast and under 30s was good. Slayte was really fast and efficient. He pretty much didn’t put a paw out of place. As we were coming down the last line, all I could think was please hit the aframe contact and he did it solidly! We finished the run and he bit me a bunch times and I looked at the time, 27 something!! Wow!!! I couldn’t believe it! He ended up placing 3rd in a class of 443 20″ dogs!

Amazing! This was not something I expected in any way shape or form! Here is the video:

Sunday morning I had my last run of the weekend with Enzo’s Hybrid. So maybe Enzo can have a kick butt run to end the weekend too…Or not. Enzo basically went feral in that run. He knocked the third bar, blew by the weave entrance, flew off the teeter and then wouldn’t come in on the two serpentines at the end and blew by the jumps. We got out of there pretty much right after his run. The weather was going downhill fast. The rain was really coming down and the temperature was falling. It would have been fun to watch some of my friends run in challengers and finals but we wanted to get on our way down to GA to visit family.

So nationals didn’t go quite as well as I would have liked but getting 3rd place with Slayte in Hybrid was one of the big highlights of my agility experiences so far. It really showed me just how good he really is and that it is just up to me to get better for him! Since that run was just so awesome, here is another view:

I was going to have Jeff take a better pic with the real camera but the weather sucked so bad on Sunday, I didn’t want to deal with it so this is what I have.

Oh and we are pretty sure that Slayte is going to be a baby daddy with Muse’s mom Emo! We’ll post a page with more info once puppies are born.