First Horse Trial

Hey! Long time no post but its been crazy these last couple weeks. AP testing for the last two weeks. yay! actually, not really. My AP European History exam the 8th of May (a Friday) and I got to leave right after the end of testing (4:00) to go to Jazz and my first horse trial. A mere 5 hours away. Fun! We finally arrived at the barn at 11:00 at night after a looonnnggg trip. Picking Jazz up from the barn (an hour away from school) and stopping for gas and water breaks along the way added the extra 2 hours. Anyway, we were there and safe so I was happy.

Bright and early the next morning I was up feeding, getting through jog outs, formal inspection and freaking over my first actual non-schooling dressage test. This was a pony club rally which meant there were about a million things that had to be done besides riding. Like formals. Long process short, you get all dressed up and make everything perfect to be told what is not perfect enough and get points off. It sucks. Then came the dressage test.

(pictue is of us schooling the test before the rally) We did Beginner Novice Test B. And got a 44.5. Most scores were between 38 and 48 so I was very happy with him. We had all 6s and 7s until the downward canter to trot to walk to freewalk transition when the horses in the rings next to us left. Between the difficult transition (for him) and the horses leaving he completely bugged out. So we started getting 5s. Then two 6s. Then 5s. Oh well. We learned and the judge had lots of constructive criticism.

Jazz was very good through the staduim phase (late saturday afternoon) where we worked at adding speed to our courses for the first time. We went clean with a nice round.

He was AMAZING for the cross country portion on sunday. We saw our first cross country jump about a year ago and we walked away terrified (horrible instructor who did not pay attention combined with a shy kid that didn't know how to really speak up for herself). Now he he the XC BEAST. Haha.. just kidding but he was pretty awesome. Never looked at a jump and had a lot of fun with it. We came in 20 seconds under the optimum time and recieved no time faults.

Overall a VERY VERY VERY fun weekend and I am very proud of Jazz!

After Having Not Posted In Forever...

I think my last post was about Quiz Rally 2009... anway, since then we have done Show Jumping Rally and advanced in our dressage lessons. We are also going to our first Horse Trial next weekend. Beginner Novice WOOT! Just kidding. Its not all that grand but you have to start somewhere. Recap of Jazz and my crazy world:
Show Jumping Rally...
We had a so-so first course in my opinion but went clear and well under time. The next day we had out Eq. class and Take Your Own Line round. My Eq. round was clear and under time but still just alright with my riding. The Take Your Own Line (TYOL) was kinda crazy. The course I chose, made up by my coach, was 3 rolebacks in a row and then flying over a few jumps before a tight roleback to a long-ish gallop to the last jump. Tight, short and effective in theory. I crashed in a roleback pretty bad about a year ago and its kind of become one of my not so favorite things to do (we're pretty ok at them, I'm just not a fan). We took a funky turn for the last roleback and the jump was about 3 feet to the left of where I thought it would be. Big, solid looking 3'3" parallel after an unbalanced roleback isn't cool. Jazz calmly turned before the jump and we flipped back around a went at it with no issue. Finished under time still. Lost the bonus points though. The first round is the speed round to give you a base score and you can earn points for good rounds in the EQ. and TYOL that are subtracted off your speed score and Horse Managment score (low scores are best). The runout means no bonus points in that round. With 1 HM point for a piece of stall shaving in his tail, no faults in speed and bonus points in Eq. my score was alright. I ended up like 7th out of 24 for my Eq. score... whatever place it is, its a big brown ribbon.
At the end of the day, my slightly dysfunctional team won with a score of 1.76 which is INCREDIBLY low. The next lowest was something around 10.something with scores going up to 40.
I am the 5th in line to go to Nationals with 1-4 guarenteed to go but I'm hoping to get a spot.
Oh, and I figured out after rally why my position was so aweful.... my stirrup leathers had stretched a good inch giving me a less than secure base to jump out of. I had just been using the same mark and didn't really recognize the issue till I saw pictures. oops....

More on out Dressage adventured later!