Our 2012 Ashley Whippet World Championship qualifier was a bag of mixed emotions. Slayte had a really good first round of freestyle and Tooney had a decent round of freestyle. Enzo attacked a disc laying on the ground for no obvious reason, decided to start running circles around me during one sequence and missed a lot of discs. It wasn’t his best moment.

Toss and fetch was also not very good for the dogs and they seemed to be missing discs for no obious reason and Slayte was wandering off the field. The dogs set high standards for themselves so when they don’t blow it off the charts, it feels like I let them down.

They read off the list for the dogs that made the second round and Slayte and Enzo both made the cut! I was surprised but happy. I was considering cutting Slayte from the second round since his previous toss and fetch round was a disaster. Jenn and I decided to let him have another shot. The second round was much windier that the first round and I was worried about both dogs performing in the conditions. Enzo was in 11th place and Slayte was around 8th. The top 5 (minus people already qualified) make the world championships. Enzo was out of a qualifying spot and I think Slayte most likely was at this time also.

Enzo went first for me in the second round and was GREAT! I don’t understand it. It was windier, yet he caught a high percentage of dissc. I expected it to score high as most people were struggling in the wind this round. I told Jenn that Enzo did good enough to jump up in the standings into a qualifying spot. She thought I was nuts, but I thought he did that good.

I am so glad I let Slayte run the second round. It was awesome! Despite the wind and the discs changing directions and being blown around, he caught almost everything. I was super proud. When I came off the field, I felt he also did better than most of the other dogs this round.

I don’t know the exact placements as they didn’t share that information for whatever reason, but both Slayte and Enzo qualified for the world championships! I can’t believe Slayte did this at just 14 months!!!!

You will notice that Slayte had the ?’s removed from his image on this blog. I am proud to say he is now a full member of Team Furrari and earned his right to stand next to Tooney and Enzo.

Enzo round 2:

Slayte round 2:

Tooney Round 1:

Jenn and I headed out towards Vegas last Friday night for the 5th Annual Atomic Blast Off UFO World Cup series disc dog competition. We stopped in Primm and stayed in the parking lot of a Casino called Whiskey Pete’s since they allow overnight RV parking. Speaking of RV, the new Nexus motorhome we got is awesome! We are super happy we got it and it has made our travels about as easy and comfortable as we could wish for. The dogs even like it. Slayte likes it so much he already ate the seat belt – yep, we have it into the Ford dealership to have the seat belt replaced for $300.

Tooney, Enzo and Slayte all did really well. Enzo was 2nd and Tooney 3rd in freestyle with me. Jenn got 1st with Enzo and 3rd with Slayte in the toss/fetch division! Jenn didn’t play with Tooney. Poor Tooney got sick the next day and took her a few days before she started eating again. She seems mostly recovered now and she should be able to compete in the AWI this weekend.

Here’s the freestyle rounds filmed from Jenn’s new iPad 3!!! They came out very nice!

Enzo:

Tooney:

Slayte:

Wow what a weekend! This was my first Nationals of any venue where I was running just Enzo. It was nice to be able to focus on him. We had been struggling a bit lately. I have been having trouble keeping on course with him. Monday my instructer Stephanie Spyr gave me some good advice and it helped a lot! I also realized that it takes an extremely high level of concentration on my part to run Enzo well and most of the time I just don’t get to that level. Running 5 straight runs clean just doesn’t ever normally happen for us.

Friday morning was the warmup standard run. Enzo was awesome and nailed all of his contacts which gave me some more confidence for the rest of the weekend. It didn’t count for anything but we placed third! Then Friday afternoon was Time to Beat. The winner of this round would get an spot in the challengers round. Enzo had a solid run and placed 6th.

Time 2 beat vid coming soon.

So it was an awesome first day for Enzo. Saturday the real Nationals runs started. Saturday morning was Round 1, Jumpers with Weaves. It was a pretty straightforward course with a few areas where I had to be careful not to lose him off course. Enzo had a really good run that was clean! He ended up in 14th place which was a solid placement. Top 10 in the 16″ division would make it into the finals and there were about 140 dogs.

Round 2 was the standard course. This is where Enzo’s running contacts can give him an advantage. There were 90 degrees turns off of both the dogwalk and aframe but at least there was no off course possibility after the dogwalk which judges seem to like to do lately. Enzo had a really awesome run and placed 5th in this round. That was probably good enough to at least get him into the challengers round if at least one of the dogs that placed ahead of him in this round were clean for all 3. His cumulative placement for the two rounds at this point was 8th!

Sunday morning was Round 3, the Hybrid course which is basically a jumpers course plus a teeter and an aframe. This was definitely the hardest course of the weekend. Enzo had some pretty wide turns when he was looking at all the off course choices. After the teeter, he almost took the wrong jump straight ahead but called off at the last second. Scary! I thought for sure he was going to take it. We made it clean through the course and stayed in 8th place to make it into the finals! I had looked at the challengers course in the morning and decided that I really didn’t want to run that course so it gave me some extra incentive to stay clean. Otherwise, I’ve always thought that it would be fun to run in the Challengers round.

The finals course looked fun and didn’t look as difficult on paper as it ran. I was pretty excited going into the finals and so was Enzo. I got a little too excited in the weave and left too abruptly which pulled him out of the weaves. After that I just decided to run hard and have fun with it. That of course made Enzo wild and he launched off the dog walk and teeter and made a lot of wide turns but he got to run fast. I was just really happy to make it there! Very proud of the little boy!

Disc Dog Empire (DDE) hosted their first competition as a club and it was a Discdogathon world championships qualifier that includes freestyle, bullseye, time trial, spot landing and pairs distance/accuracy. Yeah, 5 events in 1 day with a turnout that included close to 100 entries in certain events. DDE did a great job. The weather was beautiful in the mid 70’s and sunny.

Freestyle started for me with Slayte. He did a full freestyle routine and didn’t leave the field and only glanced off a couple of times. I mixed in tugging about every 20-30 seconds and finished with a roller. His focus was excellent. Not only that, he actually had a great routine and had 75% ratio. When I left the field I told Jenn that I don’t care about the rest of the day – little did I know what was to come! At the end of the day, this was clearly Jenn’s favorite moment.

LG preparing to tug:

Tooney was next in freestyle and what an awesome routine she put out. 1 drop! I was hitting myself because again, almost a perfect routine except for 1 throw. I can’t even say I wish I had the throw back. It was just slightly low and she slowed up and didn’t make a good attempt. It is hard to catch 20 straight discs.

Enzo was last to go for us and I did a “first”. No routine!!! What? Yeah, normally I have a totally set routine for Enzo with every throw and motion choreographed. I just wanted to do something different. It paid off. Enzo had a perfect routine with 0 drops! I was so stoked. Enzo also won the event. Considering the big turnout, I was really impressed. I have been wanting to have a perfect routine for so long, I’m glad we managed to obtain that goal. It is very satisfying.

Bullseye was very good for Tooney and solid for Enzo. Slayte had his only lapse of the day when he ran up to another dog, but then continued the round.

For time trial, the wind was picking up but Jenn had the best time of our crew with a 23 seconds round by Slayte! It was one of the best of the day, but not sure exactly where he finished. Tooney also had a really good round with 29 seconds.

Pairs distance/accuracy is a toss and fetch event where 2 players alternate throws. I like it a lot. Jenn played with Karen and Bentley and had a nice round. I got to play with Ellie and Preston and we also had a good round. I played with Jerry and Dakota and were great with a 2nd place finish! Jenn and I had a really awesome round with Enzo and my last disc just floated out of bounds, but still was in the top 10. Tooney had a good round as did Slayte.

It then hit me after the event that I could have had 2 perfect routines in 1 day if it wasn’t for a single throw being off by about 2″ in height.

I’ll leave the post with a learning lesson. When photographing Enzo, be careful with the zoom. It’s easy for him to jump out of the frame.

I’m behind on posting again of course. First I wanted to post a couple of Enzo videos from an AKC trial a couple weeks ago. I don’t really remember the runs too much now but I know that Enzo is awesome! LOL.

AKC Nationals is coming up soon. We haven’t been too consistent lately. No big issues, just a tiny bit off. We’ve been doing quite a bit more ASCA than normal and the courses are so different. I’ve decided not to do any more ASCA until after AKC Nationals. Maybe that will help…

Slayte’s running contacts seems to be progressing well. I haven’t been obsessively taking video but took this one just to get a data point. I did a lot of board running with him and this was probably after a week or two on the low dogwalk. I’m having him run to a Manners Minder. Hopefully using that won’t create the crazy obstacle focus that Enzo has after the dogwalk. The first hit was a little high and there was one big leap somewhere in the middle but the rest were pretty nice. he seems to be really consistent lately and I am thinking about puttting my dogwalk back together and having him do the full height DW. I don’t have any video but I also used the PVC box on the board and DW when he was having trouble hitting where I wanted him to. I am approaching this a little differently than the general thinking and am mostly rewarding for location vs splitting feet. My theory is that if they understand where you want them to hit then the gait will happen naturally when they are driving. That’s how it worked for Enzo anyways and seems to be working for Slayte so far.

Friday was Slayte’s 1 year old Birthday! Time really flies! Here is a year in pictures! Love this dog!

1 day:

5 days:

4 weeks:

6 weeks:

10 weeks:

3 months:

4 months:

5 months:

6 months:

8 months:

10 Months:

1 year!

The morning started off with an AKC agility trial. Maybe Jenn will get the videos up that I recorded. Enzo looked awesome and won one run and missed an a-frame contact in the other run. Around noon, Jenn finished up with agility and we headed to a disc dog clinic.

I usually help out more with the clinics, particularly with people new to the sport, but we got there a bit late and things were already moving along. We did, however, make it in time for the mock toss/fetch competition. Tooney, Enzo and Slayte had their first taste of competition, even though it was just for fun. If we are on a big field with a bunch of people watching, they know it’s game time.

I think my throwing technique is continuing to improve. I had no warmup, but my throws were still going 47-50 yards. It was crazy. I went 1st with Slayte and I got two long throws out to him and he caught both. I had about 30 seconds left when he returned and Jenn and I decided to call the round at that time. He’s young and we want to keep it intense and fun. It was very warm and sunny out and he tends to run to the shade, but he didn’t do that. It was a good call and his round was a huge success. For Tooney, I had a solid round with her, but she had one miss. At the end I went with Enzo and he did awesome, catching every disc in the air at nearly 50 yards. He got 18 points, enough for 3rd place and won a free toy for Slayte to destroy.

Jenn got to play with all three dogs also. She had good rounds with all the dogs and I think each dog had one miss. She stopped her round with Slayte after three throws for the same reason I stopped my round and again it was a successful round for him.