Competing When You Are Injured
15 Mar 2025
Let’s talk about competing when you are injured. First my back story.
I can’t run for the next 4-6 months, as I just learned from an MRI last week, due to osteitis pubis and a slightly detached adductor tendon that I’ve been reinjuring over the past 6 months. I thought I just had a muscle sprain. It has been steadily getting more painful and won’t heal until I stop running and go through treatment/rehab.
I’ve been choosing to run “broken” because I was trying to get my dogs qualified for Cynosport and the US Open; then planning to stop so I can recouperate/rehab for those competitions in Oct/Nov. We are set except Snap! needs a MS bye.
But… the UKI Invitational is 30 min from my house in under two weeks and both dogs are qualified. So what’s a fella to do? Over the past month I’ve realized I can’t run full speed and probably couldn’t run all the runs with both dogs.
I was talking about the invitational with Stacie Cwik and she asked a me great question: “if you can’t compete at your best what could you do at the trial that would benefit your dogs?” Really, the second half of that sentences is always the question when it comes to trialing!
Granted you are limited by what’s allowed by the event. You could run a portion of the course and leave the ring. It lets you work start lines, lead outs, some handling options. When I’ve done that in the past I warned the next handler that I’d be leaving the ring early so they wouldn’t be surprised. I always thanked the judge too.
Clarifying: If I go to the invitational I won’t be running. Only walking. I won’t be making anything worse. That’s why Stacie’s question is so interesting. Is there something I could do (while not running) that would benefit my myself or my dogs?
But would that benefit my dogs? Snap! doesn’t need big event experience and at almost 9 years old there isn’t much he’d gain with me not actually running over a half dozen obstacles. Spark is a little different story. At 3 yro he’s been to some big events, but our issues are actually when I’m running full out, especially with his running contacts…
So I’ll keeping thinking about Stacie’s question and see if there IS a benefit of going to “the big show”.
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