DressageLife: Horse Show Today

I had my second show of the season today. It was a schooling show - Grady's first Class A show EVER is in a few weekends. The judge is a Class A judge though, so the the scores are the same as what you'd get at a Class A. Anyways, the show last weekend was not that great. Grady was on edge through the tests. But today's show went much better. Yesterday was my worst preperation day ever. I had a riding lesson which wasn't too bad, but bathing/braiding etc. was not so good. Grady is boarded in a paddock with a shed 24/7, but I usually put him in a stall the night before a show. I was told that there wasn't a stall open for him last night, so when I put him back out he rolled and took half his braids out. Then I'm told that there IS a stall for me. *sigh* Anyways.

This morning my dad and I trailored and Val followed a little later. I drove the truck... I've only hauled once before. (I've only had my license for a little over a year) I'm proud to say that I did very well. No jerky stops or anything.

I rode Training Level 1 and 2. My goal is to show Training level all this season and hopefully qualify for regionals. I'm hoping to show him at each level per season and work our way up as far as he's willing to go.

Anyways, so he actually warmed up really really nicely. The warm up is a big open grass area and his gaits were light and springy. It rained alot yesterday so there was a HUGE puddle right at A. You had to go through it to get into the arena. Grady did not want to go through it. Grady spooked, reared, and ran backwards. But we got in, and the test was *ok*. All the work that we did on the 3/4ths of the arena that wasen't under water was good. But the work at A was, well, not so good. He spooked and jumped out of the arena, so we got eliminated. But the judge told me to finish my test and they still gave me my score. We ended up with a pretty meager score of 59.595%. What's even more, well, kind of pathetic, is that if I placed I would have gotten 4th place!

The second test went REALLY well though. Even as I was riding I thought "this feels good." And it was pretty good... We got 68.595% and first place! I was very very pleased with him. My hope is that we can get our scores into the 70%s within the next couple shows. Woo hoo!

We got home from the show around 4 pm so I took Isis for a trail ride. I sang the whole ride. Then I pulled up the mats in the trailor and cleaned out the whole thing so it would be nice and clean for next time.

So I picked out some of my favorite pictures. Here they are, but they got out of order in the posting process.

Picture 1: Right lead canter. Grady has a tendency to switch his hinds in his right lead. Val told me to make sure to keep my leg back and drive him forward, and you can tell that's what I'm doing. He didn't switch his hinds once. We've been working on his balance and straightness in the right lead, so it's improving.