NADAC Championships 2017 – Rounds 5 & 6 or Day 3

day 3 of 4. This is a marathon competition for sure.

today we were dog 171 in the run order.  The elite classes seem to run slightly less than 60 dogs and hour, the pre elite dogs slightly less than 50 dogs an hour, all the dogs average out to about 50 an hour on courses 20-23 obstacles in length.  At 171 I figured we’d be running about 3.5hrs after the first dog.  So we decided it was best for our dogs, hubby and me to skip the morning briefing and the walk through and spend the morning at the hotel.  The powers that be at NADAC kindly have been posting the course maps each day on the website so I knew I’d be able to view that before our run and I’d be able to watch at least a few dozen dogs run the course too once we arrived.

At 8:30am I looked at the course map. It’s a doozy!  28 obstacles, 2 contacts and a whole crap load of tunnels and weave poles.

At 9am I texted a friend to find out what dog was on the line and oi as I suspected when I saw the course map, today’s first round was running super slow.  We had way longer than 3.5hrs till we would run.  So more relaxing and resting at the hotel.  Which was much needed as I can feel my fibromyalgia pain levels starting to rise, ugh.  Thank goodness for modern technology meaning I didn’t have to be there at the event to learn all of that.  They are also posting results in real time on the nadac website which I can then check as an alt way to gauge where things are in the run order.

we arrived right on schedule around 11am and ran our first round about 12:30p.  Zora was on fire.  Just barely got a front foot in the dog walk contact zone, and was going so fast she flew past the last set of weaves and I had to call her back to get them done.  With all of that she still won the class.  1st place in round 5.

I was tired, hot and sweaty after that mega course and zora was clearly hot so I took both the dogs to the pond on site for a swim.  They were thrilled.  I was thrilled with the stiff breeze out by the pond to cool me off.  I even dragged my chair out to a shady spot and sat in the cool quiet with the dogs for over an hour.  Round 5 took forever to finish, nearly 7 hours so everyone was very very happy to find round 6 was a fast short no jumps, weaves or contacts 12 obstacle course.  After the walk throughs we ran our run about 2hrs later.  They were finishing up the last runs of the night when we left around seven pm.

my plan of front crosses worked very well for round 7.  We had 2 slightly wide turns but were still fast enough to stay in the lead by less than .7 of a second.  Our 6th first place!  Fingers crossed tomorrow goes well too!