Twin Rivers Classic - Day 2

Sunday dawned wayyyy too early for me. We had our ride at 7:30am so I had to be up at 4:30am to throw Jetta in the trailer and be on our way by 5am. Ugh. I am so not a morning person.

After I'd already been awake for far too long

I was super tired so Jetta got a minimal warm-up since she felt pretty much perfect. We went in and put in one of the best tests we've done recently! I was so, so happy with her effort and more than ok to end the show on that note. Previously I was bummed to not have 2 classes on each day, but I really couldn't afford it and it turns out that it worked out just fine! We ended up with a 67.8% which I was ecstatic about - last time this judge gave us a 64.8%. We got lots of 6.5's and 7's with several 8's - one for each halt, one for our free walk, and one for our canter-trot transition (AMAZING). We got a 5.5 on our right half circle because we didn't show any bend, and a 6 for our stretchy trot. We got all 6.5's on our collective marks with the comments "A bit stiff legged this morning, needs more suppleness and to bend right, obedient, just needs balance to relax muscles, rider needs shoulders more back and seat bones more forward to help balance." One of these days I'll get my equitation together.

And look up

Take aways from the show:

• I still need to work on my position, but I'm happy with the improvement from the previous show
• The stretchy trot it a huge weakness of ours, so we need to either fix it or hurry up and move to second level where we don't have to do it anymore! (jk... kind of)
• The verbindend bit was a success - I felt like she was definitley not as over her back into contact as she could have been because of the bit, but I will take that over having my arms ripped out of the sockets
• We need to figure out where our right bend went still
• I'm thinking it might be time to do some flexions and see if it's time to think about joint injections or at least some Legend or Adequan. She doesn't look stiff to me in the video at all, but I'd like just to get an idea of if she's needing more joint management or not as she's never had the best hocks
• We need to stop doing First 1 because no one else ever shows it, so it's cool to get first place ribbons and all, but it'd be nice to see how we stack up against other riders, so we need to work on our canter loop in order to show First 3!

Can't wait to see the proofs for the pro pictures, so I will post those when/if I decide to buy any!

We were the only one in 2 of our classes so we got cool stuff!