Monday, August 30, 2010

Thou must be kidding thyself



I found Indie's baby pictures!!! and aren't they just so adorable!! but of coarse i'm biased ;)
their are a couple more but i chose the cutest ones. I'm really lucky to have this many pictures of my horse as a foal not many people have this many. 

So miss sassy pants got pampered by the chiropractor again, and didn't try to bite him!! so excited about that. Well she was not much better than the last time, bummer. However a 19 hour trailer ride right before a show really wasn't helpful. So until his next visit Sept 9. all we're doing is stretching and lateral work and oh yeah more stretching. But thats okay with me because it takes a lot of pressure off. Most of the time i feel like if i'm not doing real dressage work all the time i'm not making any progress (which is totally not true!!) and by "real dressage work" i mean stuff we have yet to master such as working on collection or half-pass. Stretching not included, even though it should be. 
So i decided since we're not working on real dressage it would be a good idea to go to the now-dry cross country field and go stretch. There is a raised track around the field that stays mostly dry (most of the time) that goes through trees and borders a swamp-like pit hole, but still a nice place to ride. So we went around the track at a stretching trot  once and then went around at a canter a couple times around. We did have to have a little "discussion" about cantering politely, and not running into trees. Other than that Indie enjoyed herself so much that as the ride went on  her canter got boucier and bouncier and more wonderful and more wonderful. When i went back to the field next to the barn my mom was there and i started cantering and asked indie to canter slower and i hear from across the field "STOP ASKING HER TO COLLECT!!!" apparently her canter was so bouncy that she collected her canter enough to be seen across a giant field, which doesn't sound impressive but it definatly is!! well.........i was excited.




Monday, August 9, 2010

USPC Championships East

USPC Champs was the most fun i've ever had in my life!! My scramble team was absolutly amazing, i loved them!! We were in the first level and up division so we were competeing against two people doing second level and one doing third. I was really surprised that their weren't more people doing "upper level" (thats what my region called first level and up, their such nerds!! but i love 'em!!) There were only about 20 people, there were way more people doing training however. I mean come on people!! whenever someone moves to second level they quit pony club, its happened in my region about four times and my region is tiny, really really tiny. Something is just not right about that, its like they move to second level and suddenly their too good to be on a team and have to fool with horse management. Okay enough with that, i'm over it.
So please enjoy this beautiful camera-phone picture my friend took, there was a Professional photographer but he hasn't posted any photos yet so the phone picture will have to do for now
That is a picture of my freestyle, and i'm about to do a ten meter circle and then lengthen to B

This year Champs was in Virginia, which is in the eastern time zone, i live in the central time zone. So every morning getting up at 5:00 to get to the barn by 6:00 was actually me getting up at 4:00 and getting to the barn by 5:00, for seven days because the drive took two days each way, the first two days i was fine. Even excited if that word can be applied to 4am. But by the third day i was so nauseated and this continued for four more days, so i daresay my rides really suffered because by the time i actually got on taken three ginger pills drunk two cans of ginger ale thrown half of that up, i really could have cared less about my test. Add to the mix that india was being as my friend put it "a little turd"
Examples: almost launching her self over a cliff twice, bucking, no steering, bolting, and she wouldn't walk in the warm-up.
Mix that all together and we got 61% on all of our tests and a 64% on the freestyle. But the part i was most excited about was that indie got a 7 on her canter lengthening!!! last time the highest lengthening score we got was a five, this time we got sixes for the trot lengthening and sevens for the canter.
Just those two scores made the whole time a success.
Another thing that i'm really proud of is that from the first test to the last india really improved, instead of slowly losing her mind she slowly found her mind.
My trainer watched all of my tests and she disagreed with a couple of the scores, she thought the first test should have scored much lower (and i have to agree with that one) and that the last test should have scored a little higher. But i'm happy everything was atleast in the 60s so that makes me feel better.

So placings we got fourth in horse management, because i was pretty much the only one that had ever been to a rally that went more than two days, so besides having a couple little mini heart attacks it all went pretty good.
and drumroll please........First overall!!! not only were we a scramble team but half of us had never been to championships at all and the other half had never gone in first level, thats pretty darn impressive!!
and i got fifth out of twenty people in the individual freestyles
Yeah!! so much fun was had :D