season opener at MDHT!

Happy Monday, friends!! Exciting news today since Doozy and I went to our first horse trial of the year this weekend!! And it’s so funny, I don’t think I’d ever won an 8th place ribbon before Doozy (at least not that I remember)… but for some reason this daughter of Big Brown and I are growing a bit of a Big Brown Ribbon collection lol. Must be kismet…

serenely unaware of the day ahead!

Anyway. I promise not to drag on and on (and on), but it was on the balance a really fun day! Tho, if you go by how things looked on paper… Well. It’d be easy to come to a different conclusion: our dressage landed us at the bottom of the class (per usual), we had a rail in show jumping (also per usual), and we had a run out on cross country — Doozy’s first xc jump penalty in competition. 

“oooh are we going to run and jump tho??” — doozy, interested lol

But ya know. The lived experience is something so different from the scoreboard at the end of the day. And ours was a good one, so let’s dive in!

poem by Morgan Harper Nichols, image source
yoga teacher shared this in class yesterday and it felt so fitting for how i’m trying to approach the year, so i wanted to share with you all too!

Dan and his wife were both competing on the same day too, so Dan was actually able to pop by dressage warm up to give us like 15min of coaching to start us off, and it was super valuable. Doozy had arrived to the property like a grown ass adult mare, but then wanted to melt down a bit once in warm up. And Dan just… wasn’t having it. 

He reminded me that this is the real world, I need to ride the horse, get her on the aids, be proactive. Now. And gooooo figure, Doozy responded well to that. 

sun bathing + snoozing post dressage

And she executed what I felt might actually be one of our top dressage performances to date! To the extent that I actually ordered multiple prints from our ride!! 

Doozy was on the aids, stayed in gait, was decently prompt for all her transitions, even the downwards, and was rideable enough that I was able to demonstrate those clear changes of track between ‘corner’ and ‘circle’ that trainer C coached us on.

click for full size.
good luck reading those comments

I was particularly pleased again with our transitions into canter, although scores were mixed. Well. Real talk, scores were a bit mixed across the board bc “Today quite tense,” as the judge notes. And that tension, the bracing and lack of suppleness etc, is basically the difference between a 6.0 and a 5.5.

tanking up before jumping!

Doozy, however, wouldn’t know that. She’s tense erry day LOL, that isn’t exactly something new for us. What IS new is her level of workmanlike effort. Staying present, staying more or less on the aids. Trying to understand, to be a good girl. It’s honestly a great feeling!

dropping in with an oxer at 1!

And I’m proud of myself for being really intentional about riding the dressage as if it was the only thing we were doing for the day. Too often I kinda wing it or tacitly dismiss the phase bc “we’re not good at it, and we’re here to jump anyway.” Which like. Yea, true. 

But while it obvi doesn’t seem to make a difference in scores or placings, it probably makes a difference to Doozy. And it’s my responsibility to help her operate within a consistent set of parameters and expectations: It’s always the same, nothing changes, and we can do this!

reason #1,367 why you should walk your course: i was so surprised by how “crookedly” folks were jumping into this line that i was super intentional about squaring my corner. turns out… the jump itself was on an angle, whoops!  no harm, no foul!

Anyway, tho, realistically we ARE here to jump tho lol…. So after about a ~1.5hr break that Doozy spent mostly snoozing, we got right on with it!! Doozy was actually pretty decent in the warm up ring in terms of explosiveness, tho I think we knocked down every single jump that we jumped except maybe 2. Oof. She felt ok, tho, just… not particularly careful, so I figured we’d see what we got in the ring.

another nice oxer!

The course looked like it might suit us, being mostly sweeping curves with turns just tricky enough to demand attention. And the two related distances both seemed to be riding very consistently, so I figured they’d be the same for us. 

omg wtf with the in and outs at BN!!!

And it was honestly a pretty great course overall! Doozy got a great shot into the oxer at 1, was tidy in the sweeping left handed rollback from 2 to 3, tho we did have the rail at 3. Then was good about staying out in the tricky looking right turning segment from 4 into the related distance down the outside. And if you’re getting the sense that we were maybe trending leftward, nice work, that is in fact foreshadowing LOL.

made much better work of it this time vs last time tho!

Anyway, the course finished up with another sweeping turn to a big oxer, tidy comma turn to a vertical that we loudly rattled but that did not fall, then finishing over the 2 stride in and out! 

Not gonna lie, I really don’t remember BN having in and outs… In fact, I DO remember being sad about that in the early days with Charlie since he was such a grid savant. 

full video of the course here!! it’s a good one!

But you get what you get at unrecognized shows, and in this case it worked out great! All our gymnastics practice over the winter paid off handsomely and Doozy was easy and confident to finish the course, good girl! This was definitely our strongest phase of the day!!

was a good girl at the start box

No rest for the weary tho bc it was straight on to cross country, where again Doozy was nicely civilized in the warm up, more or less, tho it did occur to me that we really have not schooled on grass or terrain in quite some time. I mean, c’mon, it’s only March and the snow has only been melted for a couple weeks…

our friendly chunky log roll from schooling a couple weeks ago!

As it was, the course looked really fantastic. Almost all the jumps were placed on nicely rising ground, and the designer gave us plenty to do for the level, even if the overall distance and jump count were on the low side. I figured it should be a good one for us!

the footing is still a little bare in places but didn’t ride slick or deep

Tho, truthfully, we actually ended up being just slightly out of rhythm for most of the jumps. I think perhaps bc of a combination of factors. For Doozy, she obviously hasn’t jumped on terrain in a while — and especially with the rising ground to most of the takeoffs, I think she may have had her striding slightly out of sync with her eye.

riding forward to the distance made for a great jump, go figure!

For me, I think I had the canter too collected for most of the time. The gif above is nicely illustrative bc I knew it should go in an easy 7 strides for us (which it did!) but in watching the video after the fact, the quality of the canter I had in that line above is better than the quality of canter we carried in between fences elsewhere on course. 

little brush coop that i forced myself to jump in schooling a couple weeks ago

It’s always a tricky balance bc Doozy will 100% still land in a bit of a disorganized heap, running off into the unknown distance LOL. It’s just a question of recalibrating and experimenting. Sometimes ya gotta let go a little bit to see what will happen! 

absolute professional into the water, with a nicely advanced line for BN — see our red boat hiding just behind the N blue boat straight ahead?

Anyway, tho, the turn to the brush coop was kinda a weird unintuitive downhill S, but Doozy didn’t care, she jumped it great. Then we had a lovely-for-BN line from that brush coop, to a ditch, to another coop, into the water, to the boat!

tho i still managed to land wayyyyyy off our line for the next jump, circled above

None of it was super close together, but it definitely felt like plenty to do! Doozy powered over the ditch without a glance, and was straight into the water super confidently! Tho we got a slightly awkward distance to the boat, which was one of the only jumps not set on rising ground, and landed completely off the line to the next. 

and was perhaps a little complacent given that i know these slightly narrow and vertical blue houses can ride a little funny. WHOOPS!

So I rode a circle to get us back on track, and honestly I think we had the canter and striding fine enough for this house, but alas, our day of drifting slightly left finally caught up with us, and Doozy squirted out at the last minute. Honestly I think she was tired and feeling like maybe she was having to work a little too hard. 

nbd, tho — regroup, jump it again, and keep cruising to the finish!

It’s all good, tho, we just turned back around, took a breath, and rode a more intentional and determined approach, and got over nbd. Actually one of the prints I ordered is from that effort bc Doozy’s expression looks so nice! 

helmet cam of the full course here!

I remember how with Charlie esp toward the end of courses I’d be thinking in my head, “you’re so close, don’t stuff it up now!” but I’ve been working so hard to remind myself to keep remembering in the moment that “this is fun!” that perhaps I lost a bit of attentiveness. Ah well! That’s what early season is for anyway, amirite? 

As it is, we just had two jumps left to go, then over the finish line!

good girl, Dooz!

And oh my word lol, Doozy was TIRED!! It was nearly 70*F out — not overwhelmingly warm, but plenty esp considering how cold it was just a couple days ago, and Doozy still has most of her winter coat. And obvi being out on the hills again esp in slightly sticky ground made a difference.

she was actually quite tired after all that!

I still opted to go a bit slower with washing her up, feeding her snacks and packing up to go home, to let her recharge a bit for the trailer ride. She was such a super star all day, she deserves a little pampering, right??

Anyway, again, I’m just so pleased with the horse. In a way, it’s kinda weirdly liberating to know that our dressage scores are so reliably bad tho haha, bc I feel like it gives me the freedom to really focus on riding our own ride through each phase, without being distracted by the end results. 

Tho, as it was, even with our poor score and penalties in both jump phases, we still managed to move up throughout the day, go figure lol. Turns out, this sport is just hard. Who knew? Feels good to be out there and doin’ it tho!!