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