Tania and Otis: SMDA August Dressage Show

Sunday, August 5th was the fourth dressage show that Otis and I have attended this season at the Hollis Equestrian Center in Hollis, ME. My ride times were a little later than usual, so it was nice to not have to get up super early (I am NOT a morning person). I got there just in time to see my friend's Liz and Katie put in two very nice rides in Inro A, and they ended up winning First and Second place!

I got Otis and myself ready to warm up for Intro B. Otis was acting bratty, so I spent extra time walking him around the grounds before I took him into the warm up arena. I did a few trot circles and went back out to walk around to see if he would calm down at all. I didn't want to take up space in the warm up if we were just going to walk around.

When it was our turn for Intro B I went in and walked and trotted around, waiting for the judge's bell. Otis was feeling a bit fresh, but not too bad. Our test wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either. He had a nice trot, but our circles were not that great. Otis was really tense, and not really paying attention, so our circles were more like squares :-/ He was pretty tense and resistent through the whole test, so I didn't have high hopes for scoring well. We ended up with a score of 63.4% and sixth place, which was better than I thought, and we got a ribbon ;-)

He wasn't much better in Intro C tense and distracted. His trot was still nice, but the canter transitions weren't so great. He even bucked a little on our second one. We got a score of 61.8% and a fourth place ribbon.

So Otis was not on his best behavior for this show, but he was still leaps and bounds ahead of where he was last year, or even at the beginning of this year, and I just need to keep reminding myself of that.

We still had fun, and we are always improving, and that's all that matters.