The AKC National Agility Championships were held at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Florida on April 1-3, 2022. Scores are accumulated over 3 runs: Jumpers, Standard, and Hybrid (which is a combination of Jumpers and Standard). Even if you don’t run absolutely clean, you may have a chance at the Challengers round but that’s if you ran super fast and pretty clean in the other 2 rounds. Basically, the goal is to run as fast as you can but as clean as you can with no mistakes: no dropped bars, off course, or refusals.
Ann Perkins and I drove to Ocala, Florida on March 30th. On March 31sr, we went to Silver Springs in the morning and took a glass bottom boat ride to see the natural springs. There were monkeys that inhabited the park and we got to see them too. Then, later in the afternoon, we checked into the World Equestrian Center to pick up our packets with our arm-band numbers and information.
The first day of running was on Friday, April 1, 2022. We had a warm-up run and then we ran a Premier Standard run. These runs did not count toward the cumulative score for the championship, but were made available to us to get used to running on the surface. Ann Perkins finished 38th in the Premier Standard run. We were so excited about that since this was our first national event and very overwhelming.
We then ran Jumpers and Standard on Saturday, April 2, 2022. Ann ran clean and relatively fast. Then we ran a Hybrid course on Sunday, April 3 2022. She was clean again. We ultimately ended up finishing 18th in the 8′ regular class. We were so surprised and excited to have finished so high up. We were 9 dogs and 10 seconds away from being in the finals. We know what we are striving for now! NAC 2023 HERE WE COME!