Well, last time I posted about how much we had to overcome just to get to the Cynosport World Games this year. For those of you who don't know what Cynosports is - it's the National competition for USDAA - there were probably around 800 dogs (running in 6 rings) from all over the world! To say I was nervous would be an understatement. After not trialing since April I decide to fly all the way out to Denver, CO for the games and on top of that we had an amazing team. We teamed up with Elicia Calhoun, an internationally known trainer who travels around the world to compete and give seminars, with her BC BreeSea and her student, Bill Molloy and Cork. Both handlers and dogs are so amazingly talented and then there's me - taking lessons for 3 years, trialing for 2 years. I was terrified.
Back of our DAM team 'Who Corked BreeSea?' t-shirts. I am quite certain we had the best team
shirts there. Bill designed the shirts and said my shirt would be free if we made it to the finals :)
Oh yeah, and I was completely freaked out when I found out there was NO RING FENCING and the rings even shared sides!! Crap - my dogs have extremely high prey drives (there's a reason why they are sometimes referred to as 'mini huskies') and love to chase! So considering all we had been through this year, my goals were pretty low - make sure Nari stayed in the ring, try not to E, try not to embarrass ourselves and have FUN! And I was hoping that we'd do a little better than we did last year.
All I can say is that we totally exceeded my expectations.
A happy and very tired Nari after a long week of agility.
And here's how we did :)
Day 1 - We qualified for the Steeplechase and Grand Prix Semifinals!!
Day 2 - Team Snooker, 6th place?!?! I was completely shocked by this one, last time we did team snooker we completely bombed and ended up with a whopping 9 points. Not this time, 6th place with 54 points!
Day 3 - Our DAM team moved up to 17th place out of 170 teams!
Day 4 - We qualified to run in the Grand Prix FINALS and our team moved up to 14th place!!!
Day 5 - And I never thought this was possible - we got to run in BOTH the DAM Team Finals and the Grand Prix Finals!!! I think we ended up placing 10th in Grand Prix and 15th in DAM Team.
There we are after finishing our Grand Prix Finals run. I'm wearing my finalist polo they
gave us to wear during the run. And there was even a production crew filming the finals runs
along with commentary. What an amazing experience.
Just look at that awesome DAM team - from left to right, Bill and Cork,
me and Nari, Elicia and BreeSea. I was super excited that my shirt had our names on it!
I'm working on a video, but it will be a while. The person who was recording our finals run forgot to open the lens cap so all I have is the audio :) but luckily someone recorded our run and put it on YouTube :) So here it is...
Still not running as well as I normally do - but considering I'm still injured and had to deal with the change in altitude and being completely nervous (bleachers full of people, tons of people watching the live streaming video, commentators, multiple professional video cameras...), I think we did pretty well! And most importantly of all - Nari had so much fun. That was really my goal all along, for Nari to be happy.
We were supposed to fly back home on Sunday but had to change everything at the last minute because we MADE THE FINALS and had to stay an extra day!! WOOHOOO!!!
Hope everyone is well - and don't forget to HUG YOUR DOGS :)
You guys did sooo great, I would be very proud. Oh wait, I am already very proud of you two :)
ReplyDeleteThank you so very much!!
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