thornridge aCTivities

Not gonna lie, it feels so great lately to get to write about not just riding my horse, but actually going out and doing activities again too!! Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure I’d still be out every day riding and grooming and spending time with my animal even if for whatever crazy reason we could never do another off property field trip ever again… 

“behold! i’m on a horse!!” — emma, 100% cheesin

But for me? This is where it’s at, this is my jam. Going out for lessons, little schooling shows, bigger rated shows, glorified trail rides… whatever, that’s the good stuff, ya know? And I’m so grateful to have this unique but special little mare back in action for it!

there is video from dressage!! but i don’t have a good resolution copy yet

And she was the absolute most perfect little Biscuit for our CT at Thornridge this weekend!! I won’t go into all the nitty gritty details about warm up and test riding and all that bc it’s basically exactly the same stuff I’ve been droning on about for the last couple weeks. 

click for full size — it was one of our best!

Tho, maybe all that writing and studying and pivo-produced feedback is working its magic on us, bc Doozy put in what might have been her best ever dressage test! Or at least, close to it. Not perfect, obvi, and the scoring is 100% inflated, and probably by a lot, compared to what we’d see at a rated show. 

and the jompies were fun too!!

But I was over the moon with the horse, and will hopefully be able to get some higher resolution video + screenshots to share soon. 

we were a touch skittery on some of the distances but big mare don’t care!

And in the meantime, it was very gratifying to basically immediately meet the new goal I laid out in a post two weeks ago about Harmony, with the judge’s overall collective marks and commentary indicating: “6.5 — Very fancy pair! Some tension today.” Hell yes, we’ll take that!

our most, uh, skitteriest lol… wherein we’re juussssst barely making that 7th stride fit, drifting exactly the opposite direction of ideal considering our next fence…

It was a relatively quiet wait for the jumping phase — we’d been forecast to get slammed with torrential rain literally right up until the storm somehow swung south and missed us completely. So the weather and ground ended up being literally perfect, but probably a lot of people had already decided based on the forecast the night before to scratch. Unfortunate but them’s the breaks sometimes!

the end jumps always come up tight but it was fine!

So Doozy and I were first down to the jumping area, first to go for the day. And honestly I kinda like just getting straight to it, ya know? We reestablished a little connection on the flat then jumped maybe two warm up jumps and went in for our round!

a little more composed into the final line!

They’d clearly planned the course with the weather in mind. There was nothing too too crazy out there, beyond the normal “it’s kinda a tight space with turns planned by dressage riders not jumpers” LOL — and the jumps all looked small for BN. 

left a stride out tho LOL

But the ground was perfect and Doozy was ready to go!! 

video of the round here <3

It wasn’t our tidiest round ever — kinda slightly funny distances to the first couple. And while the two related distance lines walked in an uphill full length seven, Doozy barely squeezed in the 7th in the first line and left it out entirely in the last… 

so fun to be doing activities again <3 <3

Plus naturally I did my own usual rider shenanigans like straight up letting go **completely** of my right rein over jump 2, for… reasons????… and almost forgetting about the end jump at 5 until the last possible second… So yea. Not exactly textbook tidy LOL… but FUN, and also somehow CLEAR!! 

proud biscuit won herself a very pretty little red ribbon <3
as much as i love getting big brown ribbons for this Big Brown daughter… a new run of Big Reds could be nice too LOL!

Whatever Doozy’s thoughts about some of the skittery distances, she had no trouble just popping up and over and getting on with it! What a mare! I literally do not remember the last time we show jumped on grass, it’s always such a different feeling from totally flat and level arenas, ya know? But Doozy seems to like it!

all in a day’s morning’s work, amirite??

So another fun day in the books, and still all in all a pretty low-impact activity all things considered, with maybe 25minutes of flatwork and 10 jumps on perfect ground. Not much different from a normal every day ride, it just so happened to be out at one of our favorite places full of a lot of our favorite people. Not bad!!