Just Barely!

WE GOT A 60.7% AT THE INTERMEDIARE II TODAY!!!

First let me thank those of you who commented on my last post- I was REALLY nervous for this show and all of those comments helped me SO much. So thank you guys!!!


We had the best warm up we've had at a show since maybe 2009. He was forward, on the aids, happy to do his job, and generally just responsive and receptive. I kept it to about fifteen minutes.

That was stressful. We did the following movements: piaffe, passage, and two tempis. We also did small circles at the canter, but no pirouettes. I primarily wanted him to be forward and round. So there was no half pass, no one tempis, no extended paces, and none of the little movements- canter-trot transitions, walk-canter transitions, canter-halt transitions, etc.

It was SCARY to go into the court being like "huh, I hope we have one tempis today, I didn't check" and "huh, I hope he goes sideways since we did NONE of that." But the plan was set: do as little as possible and trust that the horse is trained.


Turns out that he IS trained! Weird, considering who his rider is ;)

It was green, very green. The judge said "Good effort, still green in some movements but shows promise for the future."

For where we're at, I was VERY pleased. He gave me fantastic pirouettes (although the judge disagreed), great half pass at the canter, his passage was on point, and the extended paces were better than they have EVER been. However, we lost the piaffe in the test, he didn't actually give me many steps, so we got a 5 and a 4 on them. We also had no ones, we got a 3 on that movement.

But overall we earned a lot of 6s and 6.5s. Here and there were 7s (passage transition, canter half pass left, collected walk, a single change at the end of an extended canter) and one 7.5 (walk to canter transition). We also had some 5s (both pirouettes, even though the left one was good!) and then that 4 and 3 for piaffe and ones.


We came out with a JUST BARELY 60% and a second place out of two (whatever). I'm glad we did it! The judge is known for being a bit tough so I'm so happy that we got a decent score.


Onto the Grand Prix!! Just 29 days...

Will post pictures soon :)