Strutting our stuff Part III (PICTURES!!)

After a great cross country ride we settled down and waited a little over 2 hours for stadium.  SO brought us some Subway for lunch and it was fun hanging out eating lunch with a little group.  We took it easy and relaxed and by the time we had to get ready for stadium, we had plenty of prep time.

With TWH all gleaming and glowing, we meandered over to stadium and watched the Novice rounds to get a feel for the course.  Overall it wasn't a bad course, there was a three stride to pay attention to and fence three was at the bottom of a hill, headed back up but everything else was straightforward.  During the course walk I happened time it just right to walk with 2 other sets of people and got a full play-by-play of what to do over each fence via one of the instructors to a set of kids.  Ha!  I haven't ever had a stadium course walk explained so it was interesting listening in but overall it didn't help me much as it was pretty straight forward and a basic explanation of everything.  What I didn't do, however, was walk the last two fences as they looked straight forward and my boots were giving me a blister.

When it was finally our turn, we went in and I biffed the start.  I was too busy messing with my damn watch and gave TWH a bad distance to jump 1.  It was ugly and he hit it hard with his hind leg but at least it didn't go down, totally rider error.  We swung really wide for fence 3 to give him plenty of energy to go back up the hill and cleared it with no problems.  Fence 6 had been giving people problems and while he looked at it and jumped it funny, TWH didn't refuse or knock it like others did and we continued around.  The three stride went fine and we headed for home.  As we looked at fence 8 I realized I should have walked these last 2 fences, it turns out fence 9 is on an angle from fence 8.  A little surprising however everyone else seemed to have had gone fairly straight and so could we.  I pushed for a longer stride and took jump 9 at an angle and cleared it without a knock.  It wasn't super pretty but it was clean!

I knew that we were sitting 5th after dressage and 4th after cross country, I didn't know who was in the top 3 though.  I watched horse after horse have issues, some with time faults, others with jumping faults.  I wasn't sure how we would place and when they finally called us in to place, I was thrilled to find we were able to stay in 4th place.  4th place out of 15 to finish on our dressage score of 39!  I was so proud of him, he was awesome.  I signed us up to go up a division, to Novice, at the little eventing derby on Sept 8th, let's see how we do!

This is the jump he told me that he could do this and I didn't help again, save for the ditch.

Rocking this XC Course.  He did this without my help!

TWH LOVES water

Biffing fence 1, way to forward, wrong distance.  He saved it though!

Our oops at the last fence, jumping at an angle.  Look at how high he picks his feet up though lol!