pony club stuff

Woweee it’s been a busy few days around here, folks — hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend (or extra long weekend if you took extra days off work like I did lol).

hand walking + grazing around the show grounds before dressage

We’re deep into event preparations for my local riding club’s big annual recognized event, so it’s been basically all hands on deck for the past week — and still with more to come! The club only hosts two events at this venue, a recognized horse trial and then a starter trial on back to back weekends, and the rest of the year the venue is used for other events like timber and steeplechase races etc. 

So all the jumps get piled up in a back hayfield for the intervening months, making for a big job when it’s time to pull them all out and get them set onto the various xc tracks. 

“filling the tank” before dressage. and thus we conclude my relevant pictures from the day, SORRY!

I managed to sneak away for a day this weekend, tho, to go ride in a horse show of my own, yay! Just another super low key local starter event at Buckworth. I’d actually never ridden there myself, but have been before with friends. 

well i took pics of all the xc jumps too, but i opted to scratch so eh, oh well

I was hoping the low key casual nature of the event would be a good fit for Doozy’s first full event of the year, but in retrospect that might not have been the wisest choice.  

proof that i did in fact ride the horse around the show, tho!

The event is run by the local pony club, which is super cool and all that, but it means that everything is geared toward… well. Ponies and kids lol. The warm up area was a thronging mass of parents, grandparents, small children in wagons or strollers, and fat ponies milling around — literally right up against the dressage courts too. As in, I legit had to dodge a tot-filled wagon just to enter at A. 

more random pictures — the little exercises i set up to prepare

Doozy quite naturally found the scene a bit over stimulating. I’d done my best to help her familiarize with the atmosphere by arriving a couple hours early to hand walk her up and down all the lanes, and back and forth from the trailer to the dressage area a couple times — since she seems to appreciate coming and going from a new space before actually getting into the work. 

oooh and photographic representation of what i’ve really been up to this past week. settin fences, y’all!

And honestly our warm up was… Eh. Not as good as the pre-meltdown warm up at Thornridge the week before (in a quiet indoor on nice footing), but not as bad as the post-meltdown, uh, everything else at Thornridge. I stuck to my guns about getting both legs on and touching right away (much to Doozy’s dismay), and not letting the shoulders pop out every which way. 

 

got to hang out with the builder’s pup too while pulling the flat bed <3

It took some serious persistence in waiting the mare out, but suddenly she seemed to settle onto the aids just in time for us to circle the ring for our test. Well. “Circle the ring” isn’t quite the right way to say it, since the entire ‘A’ end of the court was mobbed with spectators (and aforementioned tots in wagons).

Nbd, tho, I just rode past the judge, gave the scribe my number and test name, and then waited for the bell while circling off to the side. 

played with the common vision simulator app while choosing fence paints too

Doozy actually squeezed past all the hubbub at A without much fuss, and I *finally* remembered to halt for my entrance in Intro C. Yay me! I’m so tired of being immediately rung out of tests bc I either forget the halt for Intro C, or forget the weird broken center line for Starter. 

EXCEPT. Womp womp, my dumbass misread my division split — Intro Rider C — as the assigned dressage test, and the judge just thought I was confirming my division instead of my test when I said Intro C. So… yea. Immediately rung out again, bc we were supposed to be doing the Starter test. 

this venue is so freakin beautiful tho

Ugh. Super annoying. And the judge didn’t think it was appropriate* for her to refresh me on the test — despite having a test sheet literally in hand. So I left the ring again to pull the test up on my phone (which was thankfully in my pocket — technically against the rules). Ugh. 

And naturally Doozy was *not thrilled* about all this, and was a bit less polite about dodging the tots again at A on our way back in a second time… Which. Idk. IMO the type of world where you let spectators and small children crowd the literal edges of the dressage ring sure seems to me like the type of world where a judge can remind an errant rider of the test pattern. I mean, if it’s allowable at Kentucky, amirite???? But what do I know LOL.

(*Funny enough, instead of telling me the test herself, she suggested I get a reader — which actually IS explicitly against the rules in eventing. Moderately annoying when folks in positions of power don’t know the rules yet are inflexible with riders…)

aaaaand more random pics lol, this time from our most recent ride in which doozy acted like the perfect princess i know she can be <3

Anyway. We got it done, but Doozy was… well. She is who she is lol, it was tense and tight and all the normal things for us. I don’t know the scores or comments bc I never picked the test up, but we can all pretty much imagine what all was said. 

I will say that I was proud of keeping my legs on throughout the ride — from hip to heel, Doozy’s preferred thunder-coat style of riding — and kept my focus on keeping Doozy straight(ish) through her shoulders.

pictured: nonchalant (aka not bolting) about the poles

I had hoped for better, tbh, but maybe I just need to be a bit more patient. Regardless, after finishing dressage, we rode over to the show jump area just to get in and familiarize a bit. And then eventually it was our turn to jump too! 

is it just me or is she getting beeeefy??

The wheels definitely fell a bit off the bus, tho, not gonna lie. Doozy felt straight up frantic and overwhelmed, and all the work we’ve been doing in our lessons around patience and keeping things boring went straight out the window. After our first few warm up jumps I honestly decided that maybe it wasn’t going to be worth it to jump at all.

i don’t need perfection, i just want to have fun at the shows, mare. c’mon now

But, eh, again it was a pretty relaxed event (dressage judges aside lol!), and they were just taking riders as they came. So I opted to just take Doozy over to stand in the shade under some trees and chill out a bit while a few other ponies took their turns and moved on.

i do love it when she’s easy tho

Eventually when the area was quiet, we went back to warming up a bit, and Doozy seemed a bit more rideable, so we went ahead and did the little show jump course (in the helmet cam video above). 

Another note about this event maybe not being the wisest choice in retrospect: it was a fine little jumper course for kids and ponies, but was not super duper well suited for big striding green thoroughbreds. The turns were all a little funny, especially a weird super tight downhill U-Turn from fence 3 to 4 (which we predictably missed* entirely and had to circle).

(*Interestingly, tho, I don’t think they “charged” me for the circle in the scoring. Not that final scores mattered lol, but it’s a nice decision when the turns are a bit wonky!)

at least she’s pretty <3

My intentions with this event were probably in the right place, but realistically we might be better off riding at more established facilities with more traditionally designed (and measured) jump tracks. 

As it was, tho, Doozy actually got around the course mostly fine. All the sharp turns meant I really had to sit her down in all the corners, but I was able to let her roll around in canter and she found most of the jumps fairly well aside from a choppy missed distance at 2. 

not getting sent to the dog food factory yet lol

I did decide to skip the xc, tho. Maybe that was the cowardly choice, or maybe I could have just gone around one fence at a time like we were schooling. Which, realistically, is all this really was, after all. 

But. Eh. Doozy wasn’t really in what I’d consider a “learning” frame of mind, and I am not convinced that there’s a lot of value in schooling her when she has that kind of frantic fragile feeling. Maybe the smartest decision of all would have been to just go schooling in the first place, instead of signing up for the event. Live and learn LOL. 

As it is, we went out and did some things and had a time lol. Doozy’s behavior was vastly improved from Thornridge, but still not even close the quality and relaxation we can get at home or in lessons (as evidenced by her being a perfect friggin princess in our very next ride after this show — source of the pics above). 

Which, eh, is maybe to be expected after so much time away from activities. Perspective is apparently everything with this mare. And patience, lol. And maybe a little persistence too ;)