Back to Blogging & Upgrades

With the  start of fall comes the start of a regular schedule... kind of... and hopefully a resurgence in my blogging. I've learned that a lot of the activities I do throughout the year (playing flute, guitar, juggling, blogging, baking, etc.) are done to mitigate stress, and to be honest quite often to procrastinate. Anywho, as I'm back to putting off work hopefully I'll be back to writing my own blog, and reading & commenting on everyone else's.  For today, I just wanted to do a short write up on my thoughts on upgrading Cadence to Training:

So those who've stuck around for a while probably remember that last fall Cadence had several good runs at Entry (BN) and was starting to get bored at the level, so we tried to upgrade to Pre-Training (N)... and ended up getting eliminated at a bank out xc, and then I fall off at our last event. Oops! However, I've once again found myself close to the end of the season with a horse who is basically bored at novice, and has schooled all of the elements of a training course, and even hopped a few prelim fences. However, the last thign I want to do right now is upgrade too early and scare her. There are two events left this season: an 'easier' one that's generally considered a good upgrade course, and a 'challenging' one whose courses are always maxed out in both stadium and cross. I don't want to put unnecessary miles on Cadence, and run her at PT when really she should be going T, but I'm nervous about upgrading her too soon. I've walked the training course (from last year) at the upgrade event, and Cadence wouldn't likely have an issue with any of it. However, even though we've schooled a lot of training complexes, she's never run a full course so its difficult to know how she'd react.

Here's a video of last year's training course at the upgrade event:

(for some reason, Blogger isn't letting me put the actual clip in, so here's the link)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ9Lx2Cw22U

Thoughts?