Boot Troubles

I am going to venture out of my normal horse show blog posting to share some tips I have found out when you have boot troubles.

The Wednesday before my last horse show the zipper broke on my tall boots. The shoe repair place takes a week to replace a zipper, so I was kind of in a panic! I posted to my Facebook to see if any of my friends had any suggestions for a temporary fix. One of them suggested electrical tape, and even though I was afraid the stickiness might be hard to get off of my boot, it was the best thing I could think of... UNTIL... I thought of black vet wrap!

I bought some black vet wrap at tractor supply and used it to secure by boot around my leg. The only draw back was it was pretty sticky and stuck to my saddle a little to good. It made it hard to properly cue Otis as to what I was asking, so we had a few baubbles at our show. I did find that rubbing a bit of show sheen on the vet wrap help that issue a little bit.

Now that my boots have been dropped off to be repaired, I needed something to ride in while they are gone. The only other boot I have are my western boots. These are pretty much every day shoes for me, but they don't work very well with an english saddle because they are not tall enough, the saddle flap gets stuck in the boot. Enter the least expensive half chaps I could find. They fit over my western boots, and voila.. I have "english" riding boots again! My english spurs even fit on my western boots!

So hopefully this post may be of help to someone that finds themselves in the panic that I found myself in just days before a horse show with broken boots, because there was no way I was going to scratch and lose my entry fee over that! I was prepared to try and do my dressage test with western boots on if I had to..Ha ha!!

Movin' On Up!

Sunday, June 9th was the second show of the season for SMDA at the Hollis Equestrian Park. I entered Otis and I in Into C and Training 1.

Otis was a VERY good boy all day long. He didn't have any naughty moments at all. We went into the warm up ring three or four times through out the day and he never had an issue. I think he is finally starting to realize that it is just easier if he is good ;-)

Otis was awesome in Intro C. He was really paying attention to me and wasn't nearly as tense as he usually is. We had a couple of mistakes that were completely avoidable, but they were 100% my fault. A couple of days beofre the show, the zipper on one of my boots broke, so I used black vet wrap to hold it together. The vet wrap stuck to my saddle so well that I had to keep moving my foot too much to get it unstuck, and Otis mistook this for a cue to do something. When we were going across the diagnal he thought I asked him to canter, so we got a 4 on that movement for having a few canter strides. He also started trotting too soon when we went from walk to trot towards the end of the test. Even with these mistakes we still received a score of 67.5% and a first place ribbon.

Training 1 was next, I was excited and a little bit nervous to finally try Training Level. Otis was again awesome for this test. He took the wrong canter lead in our first canter circle but I corrected him immeidately, so we only got a 4.5 for a score on our first canter. I got a little too worked up I think about making sure I didn't forget my test that I was hurried when asking Otis to do the different movements. Had I calmed down and taken my time we would have done much better. I can't fault Otis for trying to figure out what the heck I wanted, he was just trying to listen and be good. I was a little mad at myself when I left the ring after Training 1, Otis was SO GOOD, and I let him down by getting too nervous and not fully preparing him for what was coming up next, but it was still a good ride and I felt pretty good about our first time doing the test.

When they announced the scores I realized that maybe I had been too hard on myself, we placed first out of five riders with a score of 65.83%. I was so EXCITED! To place first in both tests, one of which we had never done before felt SO GOOD. I think I am going to stick with Intro C and Training 1 for the rest of the season, that way we can really work on each movement, and get really good at each teast and then next year we can do Training 1 and 2, or maybe even 2 and 3 depending on how the rest of the year goes.

Otis and I with our ribbons