The Confidence Tour Continues…aka I Did a Thing

Squee!!

Today was the closing date and after hemming and hawing about it for days now, I went into EventEntries and just submitted everything really fast. Watch, I’ve entered Prelim or something.

In reality, I entered Starter (at least that was my intention). P (and I) need more confidence boosting runs than anything.

It’ll still be fun- I’ve been to Windridge once for XC schooling and the facility is fabulous. The footing was nice and the fences were inviting. So P and I will be there Friday-Sunday, October 6-8. October 7 is Husband’s birthday, so that’s proof he really loves me. Saturday morning is dressage and SJ, then XC is on Sunday. I’ll be camping again in my trusty horse trailer, but husband won’t be there until Saturday evening. Child #1 has a football game Saturday morning, so I’ll be on my own for food for about 24 hours.

Hopefully there’s a McDonalds close by.

A quick stalking search of MyCourseWalk and YouTube yields very little information on what to expect. The only thing I could find on MCW is last year’s course with descriptions (seriously people, not that hard to snap a quick picture if you’re already walking it) and it appears to be many of the jumps we did back in June when we were there. Hopefully P will remember, but at least we have our new facility to help us somewhat prepare for it.

Speaking of our new barn….the lesson with Trainer J yesterday! It was super basic dressage work so I’ll spare you all a separate post on it. Pretty much P loves Trainer J and can do no wrong and I suck. That about sums it all up. Nothing new or earth shattering.

I did make Husband come out to video, since he’s usually gone when I have Trainer J lessons. So you finally get some Trainer J footage. She’s an absolute blast.

If you’ll notice, everytime we come around to her, P gets all nice and dressagey. The other parts of the arena he’s basically giving me the middle finger. Look how P’s face changes when we head down the diagonal right towards her.

P when I turned to go past her:

And then this exercise will be incorporated into our daily warmup. My favorite part is: Trainer J: “Corners and diagonals are where you get 8’s and 9’s.” Me: “Ok.” Right. 8’s and 9’s? While we usually gets 8’s and 8.5’s on the walk work, diagonals and corners? Not so much. So hooooomework (that I can actually DO now!).

But really. Having this dressage arena to work in on a regular basis is going to be a huge advantage for me. I LOVE that it’s 20×40 since that’s what I show in at the wee levels. We worked on getting us to actually go IN the corners (the corners in the HJ barn’s arena were super deep so I avoided them) to use every inch we could of the arena. And transitions. Still trying to reach the millions of transitions that will get me to ride them correctly. It’ll happen, right?

Maybe this will help. I finally broke down and ordered this lil tool:

I’m so tired of working three times as hard as P in dressage and getting minimal response. Some days he’s a firecracker. Some days he’s a slug. And it was my fault that carrying a dressage whip at Hillcrest for the first time resulted in a tense test. So. Here goes. Pray for me for through those first few rides.

And to wrap up, here’s a shot Husband took of us…no clue what we’re looking at but it must’ve been something good.