Catching Up on Lessons and Shows

Lets go in chronological order. First up I have the video from last weeks show:

I have footage of the dressage warm up, but the video was long enough as it is & the footage was basically just me riding poorly as I attempted to navigate puddles and the hill we were warming up on (we warmed up on a hill because it was the only dry-ish place to ride) her spooking at stuff as we attempted to warm up on a hill. Overall, a pretty unsuccessful warm up so the awful quality of the test doesn't really surprise me.

XC is also a bit of an awkward moment, as we'd basically caught up to the horse in front of us and I wasn't sure what the etiquette was in that situation, since the jump judges hadn't held them to let us pass.... so we just trotted since we were a bit up on the clock anyway, and you get faults for being too fast.

Next- we had a lesson with my coach at a farm I used to ride at when I was a kid! It was fun being back there and seeing some of the old lesson ponies, but it was REALLY fun to get to take advantage of the awesome facility they've got.  We warmed up in their massive jumper ring, before heading over and schooling some tests in their full 20x60 dressage ring.... which is next to their grass ring, which is next to their XC field, which is near their massively long indoor, which looks out onto their front (outdoor) lesson ring.  Also, the part I really love about this facility is that for a facility with 5 fully functional arenas and a XC field, they're quite a small operation. Off topic though. So I digress- the lesson was really helpful, and we spent most of our time focusing on isolating the ideal warm-up.  What we've discovered is that as Cadence gets more training and matures into a fit, somewhat hot-headed, highly opinionated event horse, we need a MUCH different warm up than our minimalist warm ups of yesteryear.  Basically, we need a 'chill out and let off some steam' period in which we basically just trot around focusing on relaxing into the contact.  Then we need a 'stretch and relax' period, and then a 'okay, pick back up and supple' phase completes our pre-dressage test warm up.  However, those three phases each take 10-15 minutes minimum, so you've got a solid 45 minutes of work before every dressage test were before we had maybe 10-15.

Finally, on Saturday I got up at 3:30am to go haul my horse to our show. This meant that on Saturday morning, I woke up at the same time I went to bed the previous night! Which is not a fun experience.  And over those two nights, only managed a total of 6 hours of sleep. So I was really freaking exhausted, not to mention somewhat unenthused about driving 2.5 hours to a horse show for my crack of dawn start time. Next time I have early ride times (and parties in the days before my shows) I need to make sure I have someone who can drive the trailer up for me so I'm not so worried about falling asleep at the wheel! I made my poor mum (who'd come along to help me at the show) play 'guess that tune' with me on my phone for most of the 2.5 hour drive up and the 2.5 hour drive home, since that was just about the only thing that would keep me awake.  It was fun times.  I was even nodding off as we stood by the start box waiting to go out XC!