31/12/2025
We enjoyed a great year of agility in 2025 and the girls have all been so good, trying hard and doing their best every time we step to the line. I wasn’t going to do a 2025 post but then thought I might regret it later if I didn’t because this year is the last year that will feature Winnie.
🎊 Maggie 🎊
Maggie had a good season in champ despite only attending a handful of champ shows in the early part of the year as she was away for EO in July and in season in August. She won 5 CCs from March to June, taking her total number of CCs from 7 to 12.
Her first CC this year was at Tunbridge Wells which was special because Winnie got the RCC. That’s the third time they have done the double in champ as they did it at Wyre in 2023 and Vyne in 2024.
She also won the tickets at Wye Valley, Vyne, Nottingham and Thames this year, qualifying her for Crufts 2026. Additionally she went on to win a couple of the Singles qualifiers (Vyne and Hinckley) and qualified for the Olympia semis.
She won her first ever RCC this year and that was at Crufts in Champ, coming second to Laura and Endeavour.
Maggie also had a great EO, winning both team and individual agility rounds with the fastest time of all dogs, and coming third in the team jumping. She ran clear in the team final and qualified to run second last in the individual final, with only the previous year’s EO champion to run after her. She had a great run in the final and put up the fastest time, but as we all know she knocked the back bar of the spread, the very last jump, in the final. I try not to think about it too much as it is gutting to get so close to the gold and then lose it. Having said that, she put up an unprecedented number of clears in a row for her, so overall I am super proud of how she did in her first EO, having been in the shadow of her more reliable sister Winnie for so many years.
🎊 Winnie 🎊
What can I say? This dog is the apple of my eye and can tug on my heartstrings like none of the others can. She is my comfy slippers and retiring her is definitely the end of an era for me. She has taught me so much and we have had so much fun running together both at home and abroad over the years. She has suffered through more retrains than any other dog of mine, going from stop contacts to running back in 2018, moving from relational to directional cues mid-career, and learning how to threadle wrap late in life as course designs changed and I could no longer get all the blinds in.
She had some nice runs in champ this year, winning the RCC at Hinckley on one of the hardest final courses I have ever done with her. She also won the RCC at Tunbridge Wells, coming second to Maggie.
Knowing that I was planning to retire her in 2025 I wasn’t gunning hard for Crufts 2026 but I still wanted her to run well and enjoy her runs. Sometimes this year, some of the skills that I could normally trust 100% were not as reliable as before, so she had some unexpected eliminations, but she still managed to make champ finals, win a couple of RCCs and come 2nd in the Singles qualifier at Gillingham.
She enjoyed herself at Crufts and had a clean run in the champ jumping, but she was also super naughty on her startline which I couldn’t help but laugh about at the time. I had to save the run with an emergency rear cross as I was nowhere near where I needed to be!
Winnie is a long striding dog and loves running on sand so she comes into her own at events on sand with big open courses such as WAO, Olympia and some EOs such as Belgium in 2022 and the UK in 2024. She has also done well at CSJ Opens, winning two WAO Super Win Ons and won BAC in the past as well, also on sand.
In 2025, one of her sand highlights has been coming 4th in the Biathlon Overall at WAO with the run of her life in the Biathlon Agility final. This was also the year Team England won Bronze in Team Pentathlon.
And her biggest domestic sand highlight this year was running in the KC Stakes (Olympia) Jumping Grand Prix and Stakes Final. I really wanted her to go to Olympia as she had unfinished business there from 2023 when I pulled her out of the weaves in the final, mistakenly thinking I had seen her do something wrong in the weaves when she hadn’t. I also thought it would be a wonderful place for her to retire as she really loves it there. You can only qualify one dog for the KC Stakes so if you have two in the top 10 of the semi-final you have to take the highest placed one. Maggie had won the KC Stakes Final in 2024 so I did not mind her not going in 2025. I wasn’t sure if Winnie could qualify as there are so many speedy dogs in medium now, but the semi-final course was quite technical this year, which may perhaps have helped us.
With Maggie drawn super late in the running order for the semis at KCI it was possible to work out (with the help of Debbie Tedds who had a signal on her phone) whether Winnie would qualify by the time I ran Maggie. As Winnie was sure of a top 10 place by then, I held Maggie’s seesaw and tested her response to name before the last jump. When trying to see if I had done enough to keep Maggie out of the top 10, it turned out that there had been a timing issue so I was offered a rerun for time which I instantly declined and with that, Winnie’s place at Olympia was secured.
Winnie loved it at Olympia this year and she exceeded all my expectations. I wanted us to enjoy ourselves and have two good runs. I had no expectations of placing as I know where we sit speed-wise compared with the rest of the field and I knew that getting into the top 5 was unlikely. However, I had not accounted for all the weird things that can sometimes happen at big events, and I’d sort of half forgotten that Winnie finds an extra gear on sand, so when she put in an early clear in the Jumping Grand Prix, I was 100% expecting to come 7th or something like that. However, fate had other plans and somehow she hung onto that first place and won it! I was gobsmacked but so incredibly happy that on her last jumping run ever, she pulled out a win and that we’d have the rosette and trophy to remember it by. I was floating on cloud 9 for the rest of the day and vowed to enjoy our very last agility run together later that evening. She ran last and we both loved it! She was clear and went into 3rd place behind Topic and Ollie, so we got a second trophy to remember this very special day by. It was absolutely one of the very best days of agility I have enjoyed with her and so wonderful to retire her on that high 💕
🎊 Ivy 🎊
Ivy spent most of 2025 being insanely happy and learning new things. She’s also a sensitive soul and has had a few wobbles when other dogs have scared her in training but I feel like she has pretty much gotten past that now. I absolutely love training her and she is just a dream to sequence tunnels and jumps with. However, our contact journey has been hard and it has forced me to explore ways of teaching contacts that I would never normally consider. The dogwalk is coming on but we still have work to do on the A frame and seesaw.
Ivy also learned to weave this year and - in a scary departure from how I would normally teach weaves - I decided to use the weave guide method. I was curious to try it, plus I felt I needed some first hand experience of it to be able to teach it.
Although Ivy is 19 months old, she has not been ready for agility competition in 2025, but she did do two jumping runs in competition this year.
The first was at Point Zero KC show at the end of November where she had one jumping run. She was so good, ran clear and won! 🥇
Her second was an impulse entry on the day at Run Continental at Agility Base where she ran an advanced level jumping course designed by EO judge Gabriel Arriagada Osses and she managed to go clear in the fastest time of all heights, so she won that class! 🥇
I’m excited about her, and she’s very clever, but she has not been straightforward for me to train with some things but the upside of this is that it has given me an opportunity for growth, allowing me to explore other approaches and widen my horizons further than I might otherwise have.
Thank you to Q-Me Agility Training for all the training and support this year. Maggie and I love the sessions and look forwards to more in 2026.
Thank you also to Geek for the training sessions for Ivy this year. Have loved coming to them.
Thank you to Woozelbears for all the hydrotherapy and keeping the girls fit for competing. Maggie absolutely lives for her swimming!
2026 - I think I’m ready for you - I’ve just got to get the tax return done first!
