Kentucky 2022 - Dressage

Oh man, I have been wanting to post these posts for this entire week! But work has been so busy. The two days right before I left and the three when I got back were absolute madhouse. I did get some exceptional food for Cinco De Mayo yesterday though and we have today off so I'm spending it with the horses of course. And setting up these posts!

Unfortunately, with work being so busy the couple days before and my insomnia returning with a vengeance last month, most of my weekend in Kentucky was spent in zombie mode. But luckily I took a lot of pictures, so I'm sure I can piece together what happened!

Thursday! L spent the dressage days
seeing thoroughbreds so it was just
the four of us for a couple days

My brother came to pick me up on Wednesday morning because he lives on the other side of the airport and the SO was in meetings all afternoon. It was fun to chat with him on the way to the airport (and tell him that his child is going to be obsessed with eventing one day) and then in no time, I was waiting outside the gate. I grabbed some food and moved myself up in the plane because my flight had been delayed and I was facing a short layover. 

When planning, it had turned out that Nicole and I had booked the same flight from DFW to Lexington, so we chose seats next to each other and she was able to hold the plane for a moment for me to get there! Both myself and my bag did make it to Lexington. 

Proof we made it: ponies were the
first thing we saw when we landed

The coolest part of all of this was landing in Lexington and seeing how horse centric the city is. The Bay Area is essentially the opposite of that, with most of my coworkers being shocked that there are horses anywhere near us. There were advertisements for thoroughbred studs and farms, tons of horse statues and pictures, and signs that said Equine something or other all over the place. 

We got a ride from a very Kentuckian Lyft driver to our AirBnb and met up with L there. Our other friends were driving in from Louisville and by 1am, there were six of us in our cute and quirky AirBnb! 

Insane to see it all in person!

Wednesday night I did sleep better, but that isn't saying much and that plus the jet lag meant that I was an absolute zombie the entire day on Thursday. I have vague memories of wandering around the horse park and also of Peony chatting excitedly with Amanda and Hillary while I tried to stay conscious and took in just enough to realize that I came across as a huge weirdo. Great!

Luckily we didn’t have anything we *had* to do on Thursday, so we hung out in the morning, made some breakfast, and then made our way to the horse park. 

 

Of course we had to go see this guy

I’ve never been to the horse park, but I’ve heard it’s incredible and I can confirm that it’s incredible. We didn’t have seats for dressage on Thursday, so we kind of watched here and there but spent most of the time wandering around shopping. There were tons of tents set up with lots of brands I’d only heard of. 

My goal for the trip was to find a helmet for myself and stirrups for my niece. I want her in safety stirrups since she's a little daredevil (she is already cantering with me double at 2 years old lol her favorite words are "MORE FAST AUNT MIMI") and will probably fall off a lot, but I want to find the tiniest ones I can because she's in like, the 14th percentile in human size and will probably stay that way since her mom is so tiny. Neither of those I ended up finding, oh well. If anyone has any non-peacock safety stirrup recommendations for a tiny person, let me know. I want her to start riding on her own later this summer because my legs are tired from nudging the pony along. 

I came close to buying a OneK but their medium is just the tiniest bit too tight on my head. I love how you can change up the plates though so I was very close to just buying it and seeing if it'd break in a bit. It would have been so fun to have different plates for my different horse sports! The best fit came from a Charles Owen AYR8 Plus, but that’s a $520 helmet and it was not on sale, so not worth buying just to have to bring it home. But it was good to know that it fits, so when I do go to buy a helmet, I will just buy that one.

I did buy a jump strap though!

Thursday night, we ended up ordering food for pick up from a local restaurant, and that, plus the lunch earlier that day which was supposed to be Mediterranean but they offered us BBQ for a sauce, started us off realizing that Kentucky’s food is… it’s fine. It's edible and it's fine. 

On Friday, we did have seats, so we slept in and then headed over to the horse park to watch dressage for real. Thanks to Nicole, we could see the court easily, unobstructed by pillars! We were also protected from the elements, although it was sunny all weekend. 

Seats, courtesy of Nicole, thank you Nicole!!

We saw some of the bigger names go and I was generally really impressed with the dressage. The test looks fun and flows well, with some challenging parts, such as going from an extended canter to a stretchy canter circle (which I do really like, it used to be part of Second level and putting it after an extended canter, amazing, I love it). I definitely want to ride it on TC when we get back to that point. 

Obviously Michael Jung was in first place after dressage, it was a beautiful test. Boyd’s test was also really fabulous to see in person and he did this amazing counter canter circle to come up centerline which I was *obsessed* with, I'm definitely using that when TC and I get to Fourth level. What a brilliant way to enter the court to guarantee you're straight AND that your horse isn't going to go do a line of tempis up the centerline (erm, Rico and I got a lot of 5s on centerlines). Not all show facilities will allow for this around here, but I am determined to enter in counter canter from now on when I can.

There were some less well known riders (I mean, to me most riders are less well known so don't take my word for it) who put in really quality tests with correct basics. No one is perfect of course, but the quality of the basics were seen in the quality of the extensions, stretchy canter, and rein backs, and there were a lot of great basics. 

INSANE and very well deserved score

Smartpak ran a course walk with Boyd Martin, so we did end up going on that and getting to see some of the course. To someone who is jumping solidly BN right now, the jumps looked HUGE. It was cool to hear what he thought about each of the harder parts of the course though. I really like the technical aspect of the sport! 

On Friday, we ended up going out to dinner and continuing our uninspiring tour of Kentucky’s food scene. We did get really good ice cream though! I’ll give Kentucky that, they do unhealthy food really well, which I can definitely appreciate. I think it was that evening that we decided to cook for ourselves from then on. 

Friday night we decided to go to bed relatively early to get up early for cross country day!