Power and Speed

The show yesterday didn't go quite as planned, but it was still a great show!  We took four horses and six riders, the biggest showing from our barn/the college team in years.  Friday night the girls all came out to the barn to clean/clip/do manes on the horses, clean tack, and get everything ready.  Jen and I ended up helping clip/pull manes on a couple horses that were naughty but for the most part everyone got their own stuff done.  Amy is a former pony clubber and loves cleaning tack so she took apart both my hunter and  fig. 8 bridles to clean, did my saddle, martingale, girth and my leather open front and hind ankle boots!  I told her she's the best groom ever!

Saturday dawned cloudy and rainy but we pulled out at 6:30 and got to the show with no problems.  It was dry at that point and everyone hurried to tack up to school.  As we were getting ready, the sky opened up and poured for about 15 minutes. Luckily I had one of Buddy's clean rain sheets in the trailer (I store my winter blanket in the trailer during the summer) so I threw it on him as we walked to the ring.  Amy got on first to school and I took shelter under an awning by the announcer's booth.  Buddy looked good in warm up, as did the other horses from the barn. We didn't time it right, and I only had about 5 minutes to school after we switched, but I schooled the lines with him and we were good.

Amy and Buddy, Jen, Anne and Blue, and Ella and Hunter

Amy did a 2' hunter class with him as a schooling round and it went ok.  Buddy wasn't impressed with the fences, and they had a couple awkward distances but ended up 5th. Bud then got an hour or so break before my 2'6" eq classes.  I was planning on doing the eq and mini medal but I was the only one in the medal and they need 3 to run the class so they cancelled it. I was pretty bummed out about it, but there will be other shows.  Our eq round was decent, he was a little tired and we opted to make the lines a short 5 strides instead of trying to run at the 4 (which they were set).  We got a 3rd which I was happy with.

Tired pony is tired...and says "Please don't make me go again"

Buddy then got another couple hours break while they did the 3' hunters and had a lunch break. The jumpers were supposed to start at 2:30 but everyone was there so they started about 1:45 instead.  We didn't do another warm-up, just trotted Buddy around a bit. Amy did two rounds with him, a timed first round and a table 2b.  The first round wasn't great, had a couple rails down and they weren't in sync.  The second round was a lot better and they got a 1st. 

We switched again and I took him in a power and speed class.  My goal was to keep it together for the first round so we could do the jump off.  He was very tired by this point, and about 3/4ths of the way thru I had to go to my crop at one of the fences.  It was the first in a diagonal line, and we were veering slightly left of center to the second fence, so I yanked him back to the middle and went to my crop again.  Luckily that woke him up a bit and we had a nice pace going into our last fence/start of the jump off.  The first two fences in the jump off were a line, and again I knew we didn't have it in us to do the 4 strides, so we balanced for the 5 then turned up the speed.  We had a bending line after that to a really tight rollback to a slightly easier rollback.  I was thinking the whole time "hands up, sit, sit, sit, leg!" He really dug in around the turns and while it wasn't the prettiest round it was the fastest!  We ended the day there, both Jen and I agreed that we weren't going to have pony for the take-your-own-line class.

The other girls from the barn did great too.  Everyone came home with a blue and one of the girls, Anne and Blue won the 2'6" pre-child/adult champion!  It was even better since it was Blue's first show.  I asked the announcer if they were doing champions for jumpers and he said no, but if they were Buddy would have been the .75m champion.