4 January 2020 KSEC Arena Eventing....
The best thing about offering up my services as a dressage writer - well aside from the learning, obvs ;) - is that I'm getting lots of vouchers to use against future competitions and training.... which means today's competition was FREE!!!
With some recent successes under the belt, I signed up for "Class 2: 70cm Arena Eventing" at KSEC and got out our new colours ready for their first outing!!
Particularly nice as for the first time ever I am home over this period and mum was also with me so she could come and watch again. This is her video.
I'm so lucky that I can head out and do things with Fred, and that I can do it alone. He's not a diva in any way so the whole load, travel, leave him on the trailer whilst I enter an event etc is just a breeze.
Today, we didn't have any dramatics in the warm up - he warmed up well, popping all the jumps... Apparently, we'd saved the green baby dramatics for the arena! So after spooking at the arena-side banner so vehemently that we almost couldn't get to jump one, he then couldn't take his eyes off the judges box and it was either crash over the fence sideways or circle for a better set up.... Given we weren't there to do anything but learn, I did circle between jump 1 and 2, gaining 4 faults.....
By jump 6, Fred had decided this was "the bestest, stressfullest thingy he'd EVER done", and proceeded to buck repeatedly! This prompted some of my "not-very-politest" language and a slap down the neck with a whip, Fred agreed that I may have a point and started to be a little more compliant. We finished the round, both of us puffing like we'd done the London Marathon and with 12 faults, 4 for circling, and two further 4 faults for knocking poles off the jump. My legs were shaking, my heart was thumping and what I decided was necessary - was to go around again!
The second round H/C was clear even though it was still very green, and it appears we did that round in 155 seconds, so 25 seconds off the optimum time. To be fair, I was just hoping to get round! I was trying to prevent running and bucking and couldn't really get 'travel' at this point, but that will be the aim next time.
On the plus side - he didn't look at the XC fences at all, booming them all, with plenty of air! (it was just the outside elements that were distracting him) and my new colours look AMAZING on him.
I feel like everything we are doing is slowly getting us closer to the BE dream. A lot to work on yet but we're getting there, slowly.
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