Dan and I are packing our bags and preparing for departure. Next week, we head to Perry, Georgia to compete against 1,300 dog and handler teams in the 2024 American Kennel Club National Agility Championship!
I’m running Ska, my six-year-old English Springer Spaniel, and Dan is running Anthem, his nine-year-old Shetland Sheepdog. This is the third National Agility Championship for both of these dogs, and we’re hoping third time’s the charm.
We qualified for this event last year by competing at local events to earn qualifying scores. Each dog needed to earn 550 speed points (awarded for each second under standard course time) and 7 “double Qs,” qualifying in Standard and Jumpers on the same day. In the sport of dog agility, speed and precision both matter. For both Ska and Anthem, speed points come easy – having two runs on the same day with zero errors is the challenge!
Preparing for the National Agility Championship
This is our first big event of the year, and so we’ve been very intentional about how we’ve brought our dogs back from their “off season” to peak form. Each year, we give our dogs at least one six-week period with no agility or other high-impact sports to give their bodies a break. Instead, we focus on trick training, hiking, and lots of enrichment to prevent boredom! This time, that ended in mid-January.
We then spent a month reintroducing agility obstacles like jumps, weaves, and contact obstacles, then putting those obstacles back into sequences. We had back-to-back event weekends in February to assess how Ska and Anthem were running. This gave us an opportunity to test our skills in a competition environment, and also get a head start on qualifying for next year’s event.
Ska won Premier Jumpers with this cracking run…
…and Dan and Anthem won Masters Standard with this run!
They both looked great, and picked up several qualifying scores and class placements! After these events, we analyzed videos of our runs to identify areas of improvement. We came up with training plans to address those weaknesses, and that’s what we’ve been working on ever since! Dan and I train four to six days a week, sometimes practicing agility-related skills and sometimes working on each dog’s fitness.
Seven Days Out
With just a week to go, we turn our focus to the other elements of event preparation. We’ll still train Ska and Anthem nearly every day, but there’s a lot that goes into taking a road trip with six dogs!
We know from experience that staying hydrated and well-fed will keep us handling at our best as the week goes on. So, another important element of our trip preparations is stocking up on nutritious snacks — for us and for the dogs. We bring fruit, nuts, pepperoni, Larabars, and all the fixings for iced coffee for us, as well as chews and freeze-dried treats for the dogs to enjoy.
Feeding six dogs raw food is an undertaking of its own. We have a designated “dog cooler” that will be packed full of raw dog food and ice, and only opened when we arrive at our destination (unlike the “people cooler” which we open at every rest stop for the aforementioned snacks). I do bring freeze-dried raw as well, but it’s so important to me that the dogs stay well-hydrated while we travel, and it’s tough to accomplish that when they’re not getting as much moisture from their diet.
We’ll bathe Ska and Anthem one last time over the weekend. This always feels like an exercise in futility when you’re competing on dirt in a giant horse arena, but what can I say – I like to run a clean dog! For myself, I’m just a tiny bit superstitious and get a “good luck” mani-pedi right before I leave. Meanwhile, Dan gets the van detailed so we can enjoy a squeaky-clean interior while we’re stuck in it for the trip: 17 hours each way, whew!
Follow Along At the Event
The entire AKC National Agility Championship will be live-streamed on AKC.tv. You can tune in to each of the six rings! (Anthem is competing in the 16″ height class and Ska is competing in 20″.)
You can also follow along with us “behind the scenes” on our trip! I document all of our travels in my Instagram stories: @cattrainsdogs. See you there!
