Centered in the Saddle

My first show of the season is in the books!

The days leading up to the show were…not promising, weather-wise. We really did need the rain but, like, maybe not on the day of the show?

Thankfully, it turned out just fine. We did get rained on a bit on Friday, and there was plenty overnight. But Saturday ended up being a beautiful day, no rain. The ground was great for cross country, though the rings were a bit sloppy for dressage and stadium.

I had a 9:46am dressage time, so I had plenty of time to give Duke a second bath (as he likes to sleep in his own mess, ugh), braid and get ready. Still, it’s like the show clock moves faster than a normal clock, so despite having all that time, I was still late getting on and had a very short warm up. Oops.

Duke was superb in the warm up. Loose, supple, relaxed, uphill. I went in feeling confident despite the short warm up.

The test went fine. Unfortunately, he lost some of the relaxation through his back and just wasn’t quite as on his game as in the warmup. I’m sure some of that can be attributed to my own show energy being a little higher and more anxious than normal. Some of it was also attributable to the fact that we did not do our dressage school on Friday evening in the competition ring. Lesson learned. Next time we will.

Even with all that, we managed to get a personal best dressage score on 29.7! YAY.

And yet, that put is in ninth place out of 12. I think the judge was a bit lenient on the day. Not that I’m complaining about getting in the 20s. I just take it with a tiny caveat.

I got some scores I’m very proud of:

• 8.0 for my rider position!
• 8.0 for my halt PLUS a comment that it was balanced and square.

Some of the less lovely comments were mostly about me and my geometry skills. Gotta make those circles bigger and more like circles. Honestly I think this goes hand in hand with Duke’s relaxation and suppleness. It’s hard to make a stiff horse bend around a circle.

In any case, I couldn’t be unhappy with a personal best dressage score! And then it was on to the jumping phases…