Dressage Debut

We had our first dressage show in a long, long time since baby made her appearance!

And it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be!

Luckily, the show organizers were very flexible and we were able to drop down from First level test 2 and do Training test 3 instead due to Jetta's terrible behavior these previous couple weeks. This was SO helpful in terms of having a positive show experience.

Jetta was very hyper the morning of the show. I turned her loose in the arena before we loaded up and she galloped around like a psycho for at least 10 minutes before she regained some semblance of a brain. We picked up a friend on the way to the show and he was quite amped up, whinnying and pacing the entire time once we made it to the show. Luckily, Jetta seemed to remember that she's supposed to be a seasoned veteran show horse and behaved like it, settling down to snack on her hay without a peep.

I helped my friend most of the afternoon since this was her first dressage show ever (she does hunters/eq) and called tests for her. She did great for her first time not having any idea what she was doing! It was super fun to have a group of friends at the show since I'm so used to going solo. Jetta warmed up ok. The show seemed to remind her that she can actually be a real horse, but she was quite heavy on the forehand and especially stiff going to the left, not wanting to move her barrel off my leg. We had a bit of a half halt and she was only sometimes running through my aids.



We did Training 3 first and it seemed fairly lackluster to me. Jetta was mostly obedient, listened to my half halts, transitions were acceptable, she bent when I asked her, etc. The worst parts were a couple steps of trot in our free walk (seriously horse? this is always our best movement!), our canter-trot transition at X that she completely ignored and we got late, and a stretchy trot that didn't show a whole lot of stretch.

Otherwise, it wasn't a bad reintroduction to showing for us. I didn't think it was great, but I definitely couldn't be upset about it.

I was pretty shocked to see we got a 72.5% to earn us second place. The judge was VERY generous (not a problem to me!) but I was surprised to see that it looked that good when it felt just meh. But I will take it! We got an 8 on one canter circle (very surprising!) and an 8 on our impulsion. Mostly 7.5's and 7's on everything else!

Our ponies are in love - and just too cute!

Shiny!

Our second class was First 1 and unfortunately we got a little too carried away taking pictures in front of the blossoming trees, so we didn't have any time to warm up for this class. Oops. Jetta was not very good for this class. She was WAY too excited about the lengthenings - she basically took off at a gallop for the second canter lengthening, then got sassy when I circled and asked her to come back down to a reasonable speed (judge's comment was "disobedient" = accurate). Her trot lengthenings were ok, but mostly just quick and on the forehand. We need to do a ton of work to be ready to put in an acceptable first level test.

The judge was, again, very generous and gave us a 64.25% which was much more than we deserved, but we placed out of the ribbons which was accurate.

Overall, not a bad way to kick of the show year!

Her favorite move - free walk

Trying to do a stretchy trot

Wheeeee!

I think our takeaways for the weekend were the same things we've been working on - get her off her forehand, get manageable lengthenings that are not just going faster, improve our stretchy trot and my equitation is awful and I really need to work on it!