I'm still smiling from the weekend
Donald was just awesome again in the dressage, scoring a 38. It was hot and humid and he was a little slow on his feet, I felt like he could have easily knocked off 5 points had he been a little more fresh. To make it even better, Brian Ross was my judge, and he has given me some of my worst scores ever! Finally, I have pleased this judge! If I had ended my weekend right there I would have been thrilled.
On to showjumping. The arena at Rocking Horse is hard for me to jump in, it's small, there are a lot of jumps crammed in, and I'm riding a 17.2 hand moose. I had one rail but there were very few clear rounds so I wasn't terribly upset. I am going to try and make it over to HITS or some small jumper shows later this season to try and really up my game in the show jumping, I want to try and leave the poles up in April.
The cross country was a great first Advanced of the year, but there was enough to do. Two corner combinations, a real sunken road, lots of narrows and angled lines. Buck told us to just take it slow and be careful since the footing was a little hard. Donald was wonderful to jump and I saw a forward deep distance nearly every time. I didn't kick him in the gallops and just let him go at his own pace. To my pleasant surprise I was only 15 seconds or so off the time. I felt really great about this because it meant that I was saving my time elsewhere on course, not just galloping like crazy. I wasn't picking to the fences, I was riding smarter lines and keeping a better rythm throughout. Donald isn't an exceptionally fast horse so all these things are very important to him being up on the clock.
He rounded out the weekend in 7th place in a large Advanced class. I'm so happy with him! He got lots of kisses and of course some extra grain.
My girls also did a great job this weekend on their ponies. Brooke took her pony Tally to her first recognized BN and Lauren took her pony Cheyenne to their 3rd Novice. Cheyenne is a very reliable pony and nearly always finishes on her dressage score, she and Lauren added 0.4 time faults for being 1 second over the time, which I actually was very happy about, since it means she went at the correct pace the whole way. They finished their weekend in 6th. Tally and Brooke had a green rail in stadium and had a beautiful double clean XC round, which we all were thrilled about, being Tally's first event and all. Tally and Brooke finished in 9th in the BNR which was a fairly large class. I'm very, very happy for them both.
This weekend is an off weekend from competition, so I'm going to run the two ponies back up to Maryland and check on things up there.
xoxo
k
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