Centered in the Saddle

Cross country day! A.K.A. The craziest day of my whole month of August. I not only rode cross country, but I then turned around and went to a wedding an hour away. Whew.

But first, the fun stuff!

Cross country was great! The course was big but not terrifying. The scariest part for me was how loopy it was. There were very few straight lines – lots of looping around to get to the next jump, which made me fear getting lost.

The one jump I was really nervous about was jump 10 – a big white picnic table. It was max height and width, and was painted bright white. It just looked beefy to me while walking the course.

But it went fine! I’ll just let you watch the helmet cam:

There’s less entertaining commentary from me than last weekend because dang it was hot and super humid. So apologies for a lot of heavy breathing, whispered encouragement, the occasional growl to get forward to the fence and a lot of repeating, “easy” because Duke likes to go zoomies on cross country.

Duke got a little hung up behind over fence five but galloped on just fine. Fence 10 was fine, a little peek-y but he put in a good effort and we got over it. I mis-read my watch heading up the hill to 9 and thought we were going too fast…about 30 seconds later I realized we were actually exactly on the right time. 2:34 at at the halfway mark. I also enjoyed the moment as we turned to 14, when Duke locked onto a Prelim fence for about two strides and I had to tell him that wasn’t ours. He was ready to tackle it!

And we made it clear and inside the time! Hooray!

My wonderful family and teammates pulled tack and equipment off me and Duke so we could get cooled down. Once he was settled in his stall, my hubby and I dashed off to shower and get ready for the wedding. HUGE thanks to my teammates for caring for Duke that night! I couldn’t have done it all without you.

Before and after, with just a couple hours in between. I may have painted my toenails in the car on the way to the wedding.

I got to explain to the table about eventing (‘equestrian triathlon’ worked really well to describe it). It was a lovely wedding. I slept very well that night!