2014 AKC Nationals

2014 AKC Nationals really snuck up on me. I’ve spent the past three months riding the high from placing in finals at the 2013 AKC Invitational in December and haven’t given any thought at all to what I hoped would come out of 2014 Nationals. That said, I was excited, thrilled, ecstatic even, to be going. As a competitive person I live for the pressure that can only be felt at competitions like these. The highs are higher and the lows are so much lower. I swear national finals are addictive. Once is just never enough.

And how could we not make the finals in Harrisburg? We’d just done it less than three months ago. I spent the entire weekend telling myself that we’d do it. But we didn’t. By 8 dogs and more than three seconds. Trixie and I were clean in all of the rounds and finished 27^th out of 276 12” dogs. True, we did beat some amazing teams, but to say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I knew that we were capable of so much more than what we did. After I got home I obsessively reviewed the runs to try and find where I’d lost those 3 seconds. Jumpers was fairly tight, but slow - more than 5 seconds off the leader. Our standard run was mostly nice, but the end line was really wide, costing us at least a second, maybe two. Hybrid had decent lines, but was slow, again more than 5 seconds off the leader.

When I had been packing my bags to leave Harrisburg I had several people tell me how well they’d thought we’d done. They said how impressive it was that I had accomplished what I had given the dog I was running, but if I wanted to compete at a higher level, I would need a different dog. I smiled and laughed like I agreed with them, but I didn’t.

At our local trials Trixie actually is one of the faster dogs, so I think of her as being fast, but she’s isn't. But that’s not her fault, it’s mine. I 100% believe that Trixie could become a really competitive dog, I just need to put in the time to get her there. When I initially trained her foundation I was so excited to get out and compete with her that I didn’t spend the time to perfect each obstacle; as long as she could do it it was ok with me. As a result her teeter is slow, her dogwalk contact is iffy, and she has little drive for jumps. Even her tunnel performances could use work. Long story short, the next few months will be training, retraining, and researching ways to get Trixie and me to that “next level.” Even though AKC Nationals didn’t go the way that I hoped they would, in a way I’m glad that we didn’t make finals. I’ve always felt that things that you don’t have to work for don’t mean anything. The more you work for something, the more it means when you get it and if I want finals again, I’ll have to work for it. 2014 AKC Nationals will definitely be the kick in the pants I needed to finally break every obstacle performance and start from scratch again.

On the plus side though one of my English Cocker friends took this great picture of Trixie and I together, so there's that :)