In a Court!

DAMN my horse is brilliant.

Today I threw him in the trailer and my wonderful mother who can back a trailer anywhere drove us over to Tracey's barn in Watsonville for a lesson in the dressage court.

Rico was STOKED. He got out of the trailer and the spooking began. Tracey and I found it amusing at first but man was he irritating once I realized that he wasn't going to calm down. Once as we started the trot work though, everything fell into place beautifully.

Now, I don't have a dressage court at home and we don't use the one at Woodmyst when we ride there, so it's been since my last show at the end of June since I rode in a court at all. Yikes.

First, Tracey noticed how poorly I rode my corners. I didn't actually enter the corner, just kind of skipped it all together and wondered why all hell broke loose on the other side. Next, Tracey noted how horrible I was about actually riding to letters. The test has a bit like this: KE shoulder-in right, E volte 8m right, EG half pass right. I was evidently not quite getting to E with those voltes so it looked like I just drunkenly pulled on the inside rein and circled whenever I felt like it. I guess that won't win you any points from the judge and it certainly doesn't win you any praise from Tracey.

Once that was resolved, the trot work in general was quite good! I need to get used to riding his big fancy trot a bit better so that's my project this week before the show. My mom got some videos and it was obvious that I was riding more like a 3rd level trot within the confines of an FEI test, big problem.

After the trot, we moved into the canter and he was completely spot on over his topline and, once as it was made clear to me how quiet the canter was, very active. We rode the half passes first and once again my lack of riding corners caused serious problems on the other side. Once as those were fixed though, we had the most brilliant zig zag EVER I mean really, who is this animal??

We focused a lot on the tempis since I can't ride 5 changes anywhere. I was pleasantly surprised that Rico was very focused and good about the count. The quality of the changes weren't that great, he'd kick every now and then and he got progressively more downhill as we went along, but I was pleased. Tracey (as usual when it comes to things that I find good and she finds unacceptable) wasn't pleased but it was mostly me who she wasn't pleased with. Evidently I throw my upper body around like a rag doll during the changes and the video proves that she's totally right (not that I ever doubt her anymore)!! I was so confused by keeping my upper body still that I couldn't actually ride any changes without moving. So that's a project this winter.

Finally, we ended with some large working pirouettes in the pattern we'll be riding. You head across the diagonal, pirouette around X-ish, then come back and counter canter the short side until C when you change. The pirouettes are tough for us, so Tracey wanted to make sure that I could do that counter canter and change movement well enough so that the whole pirouette pattern wasn't a complete disaster. It went surprisingly well when I didn't let him stay off the bit after the pirouettes. He gets a bit hollow in them, which is fine, but when he stays hollow through the counter canter, he goes together behind in the change and that's BAD. So my big goal in that pattern is to not let the pirouettes ruin the counter canter and change.

Overall he was absolutely brilliant. I'm SO pleased with how far he's come. My first lesson with Tracey was all about connection and walk-trot transitions, now we're showing Prix St George in eight days.

Pictures/stills from the videos to come! Unfortunately a lot of the videos were blurry (need to figure out my mom's new camera...) so I don't know if I'll be able to post the videos, maybe bits of them!