Let's Try That Again... FENCE Novice CT 3/24

This past Saturday was another FRC schooling show at FENCE and since I haven't ridden a dressage test since last August I figured I should get my act together and send in an entry!!!! After doing the schooling rounds at the last FRC show I felt a lot better about jumping Chimi around Novice and signed up for the Combined Test

Love that face!

There were supposed to be 5 in our division but 1 person scratched, probably b/c the weather wasn't looking to good with rain in the forecast. My ride time was set for 8:07 am which meant an early morning wakeup call at 5:30 (I am soooo not a morning person) where I quickly fed the ponies, tossed Chimi on the trailer, hoped for the best, and off we went!!!

Even though I did not enjoy the early morning wake up call I really enjoyed the small number of horses in the warmup! Chimi does not like horses approaching him straight on so warmups are usually spent trying to dodge horses instead of getting all the pieces together. At FENCE there are 2 warmup rings and they had 1 set up for the jumping later on. All the other horses at the show that early in the am were in the warmup ring w/o the jumps and I took one look at a young little app screaming it's head off and flailing about that I checked out and headed over to the jumping warmup. It was perfect b/c we had the entire ring to ourselves. Can every warmup be like this? No? Damn. 

Finally it was time to head across the bridge to the dressage ring and attempt our first try at the new Novice A. Overall I was pretty happy with our test. Chimi was a bit peaky at things going on around the ring so we had little to no bend in a few spots but he was pretty consistent. Chimi memorizes dressage tests so I can't practice them at home so it was really nice being able to get through a test where I wasn't constantly battling Chimi going "we trot HERE! we canter HERE!" b/c in his memorization he's not the most accurate horse. We did have a small moment where we were circling at E and Chimi said "oh oh oh we canter NOW!" but we still had 1/2  a circle before the canter and I was able to get him back and since he was confused he didn't do it the other direction WINNING!

So basically Chimi can trot fancy but we need to work on walk and canter, but I'll take this!!!!!

After our test we had an hour and a halfish before stadium so I had enough time to walk the course and say hello to some friends before having to tack up and head back over to warmup. Chimi felt great in warmup so we only jumped a couple of jumps before heading over to the course.

The course was fairly straight forward but had a few tight turns to keep you on your toes. 4-5 was a loop back and then 5-6 was a loop to the long side, but from 8-9 you had a decent left roll back but at least you had enough time to reorganize if you totally botched the turn. The rider in front of me pulled the rail at jump 2 b/c it came fairly quick after the turn from the rail. I saw this and knew I needed to keep the energy going otherwise we'd make it ugly too!

Feel free to fast forward to 48 secs for the Oh Shit moment

Our round started out fairly nice, Chimi was in control and I felt like I was doing my part as his rider. But starting at jump 4 things started to unravel. Chimi started getting bolder through the course and instead of riding him like I should I started pulling and not staying supportive with my leg. So after we made it over jump 5 I really stopped riding and managed to "stuff the Burrito" into the 2 stride combination and Chimi being the amazing horse that he is somehow got us out of it! He put 3 strides into the 2 stride but didn't touch a rail (somehow). If you watch the video you can hear me shout "oh SHIT" and fall on his neck over 6A. Thankfully we had a long time before jump 7 and at this point Chimi was like "hold on bad rider! I've got this since you don't!" and almost jumped me out of the tack over jump 7. Somehow we managed to get over the last 2 jumps and I gave Chimi lots of praise for saving my ass.

Round 2

After everyone that was competing in the Novice CT went I headed back into the ring to do a schooling round. I really like that they do this b/c I really needed to go back and try to fix my shitting riding in the last round! The 2nd one was much better, except for the turn from 4-5 where Chimi flung his head straight up in the air (probably b/c I was lifting my hands and pulling and dropped my leg) but again b/c he's amazing we made it over jump 5 and had a lovely ride through the 2 stride and finished up quite nicely over the rest of the course.

After untacking I loaded Chimi on the trailer and took him home. I didn't have a lot of time before I needed to be back to the show b/c I was volunteering in the afternoon. (well at 11:15) B/c of this I didn't have a chance to look at the scores until I returned. When I got back I went up to check in at the office and find my dressage test. And what would you know, attached to my test was a BLUE RIBBON!!!! Somehow we had pranced our way fancily enough around the dressage arena to score a 28 and b/c Chimi is amazing despite my bad riding he left all the rails up in SJ and we ended the day on the 28!!! I was pretty darn excited b/c not only did we get a pretty ribbon, we also got a FRC mug, a FRC tote bag, and $10 to the Farmhouse (our local tack store) Kind of a nice little swag bag that I wasn't expecting!

The mug's cartoon might be my favorite ever :)

We still have plenty of improvements that need to happen before our next outing, and next time the competition will be a lot tougher and we won't have a warmup ring to ourselves, sadly. So forward and onward b/c FENCE HT is coming up and there will be people there that get low 20's on their dressage test that very possibly will be in our division!!!!! YIKES!!!! Oh and a small fact that my horse was LAME yesterday morning for our jump lesson!!!! Grrrrrrr..... I'm pretty sure it's just an abscess b/c there's no heat or swelling in his leg and the non stop wet weather is just asking for an abscess. So  fingers crossed it blows out in the next day or so b/c "Ain't Nobody Got Time for That"