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!