Weekend Wrap Up: Surprises Galore

 This weekend was not short on excitement. I am really excited to tell you all how the show went but first I have to share some exciting news… Houston is home. On Friday his current owner contacted me and long story short he is mine again. He was delivered yesterday and I am so excited to have him back. I always loved him and regretted stopping riding. I am still so in love with Annie but I am really grateful to be in a place where I can manage to make it work with 2 horses – less some showing ;).I will update more on a game plan for Houston tomorrow but today I want to talk about Annie and how her second horse show went. I also got to show a barn mates horse in the jumpers as well! I have been pretty under the weather this week so by the time Friday evening rolled around and we got to schooling at the show grounds I was beat. That combined with poor planning was a recipe for disaster with the green horse. Annie was feeling up and overwhelmed – I don’t blame her – this was her fist outdoor horse show. She ultimately kept it together with a piece of thread and after NT schooled her around she came back to earth a bit. Shout out to NT for getting on the frazzled baby horses when the sun has set. One of the many reasons that I love having a trainer that rides (really well).

Fast forward to Saturday morning and Annie was a different horse – AKA the horse I know and love. We got there really early so that I could lunge and flat before the schooling ring got crazy and that made all the difference for her. While she was still up she wasn’t channeling that energy in a negative way. By the time we went in for our 2′ warm up Annie was ON IT. Considering she didn’t get to school any of the fences the night before because the rings closed (yes yes I know you can’t do that at rated shoes anyways) she was almost being too good for me about her lead changes. I got a little or a lot over zealous with my steering and ended up inadvertently asking for the change in front of a few fences when we bobbled. Oh well I am not going to complain about her because she was perfect and I need to be a better jockey.

The rest of my OF classes were pretty good with mistakes scattered through out – note to self: get in better shape. Anything that happened was more rider error than horse error (as is the norm) and we ended up with a 5th(of 16) in our warm up, 2nd in our first Special Hunter OF, and 1st in our Special Hunter US – out of 14! I was so impressed with my little horse. It’s not all about the satin but the satin was a nice bonus!

Tomorrow more on Houston and then I’ll also share more details on the horse that I got to ride in the jumpers too!

47 comments

  1. Heather F. says:

    Woohoo! Goo baby ginger! You know, even at a lot of rated shows, the hunter rings open for schooling at the end of the day. But honestly, I think it’s much easier on the horses if you can skip the extra schooling, because horse show weekends are already taxing. I started reading the blog after Houston so I’m excited to “meet” him.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.