On Saturday, it felt really good to have an off day from showing. Mostly because my inner quads were getting sore from all of the riding from the past week. Currently, Meyer is for sale (anyone want to buy me a nice horse ;)), and a potential buyer was going to look at him on Saturday while we were at the show. A difference in price in what the buyers wanted and what the owners wanted meant that they weren't going to come out so I had a schooling day on Meyer instead of Meyer being ridden by someone else.
We rode in the main warm up arena for the open show. In that ring, there are a fair amount of people watching or walking by the arena. I always like riding in front of people so that motivated me a little bit more. Picking up on the high note we ended with on Friday we put together a superb schooling day, only riding him 20-25 minutes. We schooled movements we would be showing the next day, primarily canter half passes and flying changes. Meyer felt super and the ride was one of the best rides I can remember on a horse in a long time. We received a lot of compliments from the riders in the ring and had a couple of people come up to me afterwards telling me how good Meyer looked with me riding him. Now, I have to admit, it felt really good having a small audience and the compliments.
On a funny side note, during that ride there were three or four other male riders in the ring and I was the only one without a European accent.
We were able to pick up a ride on Sunday. Following the trend of the show, we had another early morning ride, this time at 8:30am. So another early day was in the plan. We followed the same plan as before with the early lunge before getting on. I only lunged him 5 minutes to loosen him up as he was looking very relaxed.
The warm up went well and the flow we had the past two days was there, but just not quite a brilliant as the last two days.
We rode Third Level Test 2. Again, we put in another solid ride. Meyer's walk is not the best and the judge slaughtered (really scored us low) us on it. We scored 6's and 7's on all of the movements except for the walk movements and on one of the flying changes. I was really pissed at the flying change score because it was not as bad as she scored us (scored us a 4). That's the fun with dressage, you're at the mercy of someone else's subjectivity.
We placed third with a 58.9%. The kicker was, we finished one point behind first place and the low flying change score was the difference. Without the walk scores we had a 64% or 65%.
All in all the was a good show. I put together solid rides on a horse I rode for a week. For the first show in 10+ years, I couldn't have asked for anything better. I had great support from my sister Julia who came up for two of the days, my friend Amanda Olson, Meyer's owner Jocelyn Hamann, and all of Amanda's riders from Mandolin Dressage.
No comments:
Post a Comment