Tuesday, August 2, 2011

The New Vocations Charity Horse Show

I took my OTTB Vegas this weekend to do the Beginning Hunter 2' division. He was so good! :) We haven't been to a horse show in 3 years and we hadn't done much advance schooling over fences with the heat lately, so we went in with the 2' goal and were willing to downgrade as necessary. Fortunately for us, he was a complete rockstar (think Mick Jagger level) and jumped everything. We have some basics to work on, obviously, but over the course of 3 days he and I greatly improved.

We arrived Friday night with six other horses and went out to school, he was a tad distracted but worked out of it great. We then went in the show ring to hack around there and I said WTF, I'm just gonna pop over some of these and see how he's doing. He was awesome, went over everything... Slightly crooked over the lines, but hey he went over and he was distracted. :) Proud of him!

Saturday we just did the 2' warm up trip to get him in the ring and focused, he did really well. We had to circle at one point which wasn't in the course but I figured I'd rather get him going properly than rush anything.



We just hung out for the rest of the day after that, it was hoooooooot. Sunday we did the Thoroughbred In Hand first thing (3rd!) and then we had our Beginning Hunter division around midday. Our first trip was a little rough, I don't think I rode him correctly through it and I blame myself, we had a run out in the second portion of the first line :( Recovered well and went onward. Second trip same thing, only you can see clearly that I just stopped riding after we got a bad spot :( Sorry Vegas.



Our last trip was our best, did you know that if you keep your body up and back and a nice supporting leg on that your horse will actually jump nice? Damn, I didn't figure it out until too late! He was so good, we got a little speedy down the far outside line but he came back nicely and we rebalanced for the near line. Sorry about the lack of zoom and strange cut off points, my friend's fiancee wasn't well acquainted with this camera, lol.



Here are some pics... And another tip! Don't ride in your brand new tall boots for the first time at a horse show. #1, ouch. #2, my leg was swinging like a pendulum because they weren't broken in to where I could utilize my leg! Dang! This happens! He looks really awesome though.





Horse show puppy! This is Ella


I'd say our barn cleaned up fairly well! We only had 7 riders :)


That's all for now... Stepp and I are still aiming for South Farm if we can hitch a ride :( If not, I'm not sure what's up.

3 comments:

  1. Wow your barn cleaned up big time!! Congrats!

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  2. Thanks Kate :) We did really well, I'm so proud of everyone! For the kiddos it was their first "big" show.

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  3. Great blog! Why not come and post it for more to follow at hay-net.co.uk an Equine Social Blogging Network!

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