Virginia HT, Part III

Ok, so at this point Leo and I had been at the Virginia Horse Center since Thursday afternoon, where on that day I worried the entire time how or if I was going to ride my horse. One of the reasons I’d put off telling Trainer B I’d wanted to ride was because we’d had two, ahem, interesting educational lessons leading up to the show, and I had this ridiculous fear that if I’d told him I wanted to ride, he’d be all, “I mean…should you?”

But on Friday I bit the bullet after seeing how tiny the XC jumps were, we switched as Leo’s rider, and I did dressage on Saturday, which had us tied for 2nd place, 2.2 points away from first. Now all I had to do was jump my horse over a course of jumps for, well, the first time ever (his 2nd course ever), and possibly even canter fences…another first, seeing as Leo, aka Spider Legs had been solely trotting fences up until that point.

Then my nerves were slightly abated when I heard the announcer say that the horse trial divisions (the show was also running CCI1/CCI2/CCI3 divisions) would be doing stadium up in the arena Leo and I had just done dressage in the day before. So whew. At least it’s an arena he’s already been in.

Until I went with Trainer B to check out the CCI3 SJ course in the big Grand Prix arena in the middle of the Horse Center and saw course maps posted for the FEI levels…AND STARTER.

How cruel does one have to be in order to run the 3* and STARTER in the same giant GP arena?

I considered asking the show office if I could just stick him in BN. After all, we’d done the same dressage test as the BN division- just slide my score in wherever you see fit, mmmkay? I’ll totes jump bigger fences if it means I can do it in a quieter arena. To give you an idea of how nuts the area the GP arena was, when I was standing near it with Leo earlier in the day, FIVE loose horses (in the span of less than an hour) galloped directly past us, as that arena stands directly in the path from all the other arenas/XC back to the barns.

But I digress.

The warmup was next to the coliseum, and while Leo was a little on edge at first, he actually warmed up super. Didn’t do even a little bolting after any of the jumps and was fairly steady to each fence, even the oxer. So with that, we went into the GP arena with the instructions to trot the first fence, immediately do a downward transition, trot the 2nd fence, then play it by ear after that. If he rushed before or after a fence, immediate downward transition. If he was balanced and relaxed, let him canter.

And voila!

He had a rail at jump 2 because I simply held on too long, but it was so fun to feel his confidence grow as we went along. They had the ground poles set about 6″ in front of each jump, so he whacked at least 3 of those, but the rest of the rails stayed up. And check out that flying change in between jumps 4 & 5!

I was thrilled as we came out, even more so as we headed up the hill to Trainer B’s SJ and my XC and Trainer B said that’s what he needed to see before moving him to BN.