Sunday, August 15, 2010

Silver Hills ODE

A good weekend with the horses. I have to thank my best friend for being my groom, made my life less stressful – that’s for sure. This was my first eventing competition for the year, considering that we did fairly well. The dressage left much to be desired, I need to get the musculo-skeletal vet out again and get Rion on the mend. Time to get the dressage saddle out more often I think. Pippy was in the intro class (80cm) and Rion was in the Pre-Novice (1.05m)

I was appointed yesterday as Pippy’s trainer; she will be staying at my place for a month. She tends to get nervous in her dressage, particularly in the warm up area. I have a month ahead of me to fill with work for both the horses. Time to go back to my sources and get some good dressage exercises. I love 101 Dressage Exercises, amongst the other 101 books, they are all great. She is such a great little jumper though, so much spring, very quick. We had a clear showjumping round though we did have two time fault which I’m not happy about. Something to keep in mind. We had a great cross-country round. Straight through the water, didn’t even look at a single jump and we were exactly on time, take a second or two. All good on the jumping front but my job is to improve the dressage. Bring it on I say!

Rion jumped well in showjumping though I made some rather stupid pilot errors, giving us three down, another thing I’m not happy about, being a showjumper I don’t like knocking fences when I’m out eventing. The x-c footing was good, not hard, just the right amount of give. At least it was before the freezing rain and hail bucketed down in the 10 mins before I had to start. In my min countdown to start he started to get more tense, he had been rearing in warm up, which is customary for him, though it is rather annoying, he started rearing 10 secs before start time. Mum couldn’t get near him to walk him in; by the time she did we were already 20 secs behind, once I got him out of the box I didn’t even bother starting my watch, we were behind time and the footing after the rain wasn’t worth killing myself over. I just took everything easy, kept forward and galloped only in the long stretches between jumps. I had to stop on course as my gaiters unzipped and was annoying the heck out of me. So on the time front I don’t even want to know how many penalties I got! He jumped absolutely perfectly however which I am pleased about.



Me and Rion :)

So overall I would say we had a good weekend, despite our flaws. Waiting on the musculo-skeletal vet to get back to us, then I could sort Rion out faster but until she does I will just have to keep doing the muscle exercises she gave me and massaging him my self. Well that’s all for now, over and out.

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