2nd Competiton of the Year

Yesterday I had a great day at a Hunter Jumper competition! I rode twice in the afternoon  with Lysistrata and Mia, both in the Club 2 Designed Movement class. I was number 4 with Lizzie and 20th with Mia. I was pretty nervous in the morning but it wore off soon. Bertha had a rough day with an elimination on Mia and at least 4 faults on Lizzie in the 1m class. Louise was very pleased with her two rounds on her marvellous grey. She made no faults on her 1m class and one fault in the 1.10m style class. Then there was the 3 1/2 hour wait till my class. That long wait turned even longer when the whole thing ran late so I ended up competing around 3PMish instead of 1.30ish. Katie was there and competed on Special in my class but I did not see her as I was preparing Mia. Lysistrata was absolutely great, she was quite slow and wasn't rushing around which is a first. We had no faults except I held her back unconsciously and we broke into a walk for a moment when we were trotting and weaving in between cones. Grr. But its just one little fault in ten obstacles. Mia and I were a mess. Lizzie and Mia are very different, one of the differences being Lysistrata is 16 and Mia is 8. Mia was brilliant and jumped everything superbly, but I lost one of my stirrups on fence 4 so I jumped the remaining 5 (one obstacle being weaving around 4 cones at trot) with one stirrup. Good thing I knew how to jump with out stirrups! Because of my longer leg Mia rushed on to fence 6 and the double at 7. Because of that I failed the weaving thing even after I made a circle to try to get her under control. I failed to trot to fence 9 and then made a weird jump at fence 10 before falling off afterwards. XD. Elimination. Dang. Mia however was the talk of the club because after losing her severely incompetent rider (lol) she cantered over to some fences and jumped five and four backwards and finished with a circle! So here I am with blistered fingers, a bruised head, aching neck and back, a pulled muscle in my right calf and a severely bruised right calf bone. The results are back and I came 13th out of 23 on Lizzie and El./23 on Mia But hey! It was a great day and a lot of fun was had by all! The facilities were amazing and the EC was stunning. They had over 60 stalls and at least four arenas, although only one was used for the competition. I will try to get those videos up too so stay tuned!

Finally I Get My Act Together

Well, I think someone can award me the worst blogger ever trophy, I'm sure I have won by miles. So sorry to keep you waiting, time slips away when you have something like this to do. But here I am to make amends. Today I was assigned my beautiful Mia and Charlotte got Larissa for the Thursday five o' clock lesson.. Geoff had to go to Paris unexpectedly (poor him XD), so Laura instructed this lesson. Louisa rode today, along with Melonie and an English lady. We just did the course we have been usually doing the past couple of weeks (vertical, turn to the left, do the double of three strides, turn to the left again, to the oxer on the diagonal, turn to the right, do the double of three strides (get all that?)) except without jumps. Then surprisingly she put up two tiny jumps both of them on the last fence of each double. They couldn't have been more then 10 inches (25-30cm). So puny on Mia! XD. Then Louisa got the notion to ride everything without stirrups, so she did that. Laura said anyone who wants to try as well could. Guess what, I said I'd try. I have never jumped without stirrups before so this was going to be interesting. No, I did not fall stop you oh no this wont go well, giggle, gigglers. It went really well, Mia was a darling and I was thinking it would be a lot harder. I am REALLY gonna pay for it tomorrow though because my thigh muscles were clamped the whole time. I ended up doing the jumps twice and had a lot of fun. Charlotte did really well but did not try without stirrups because the canter did not feel right. Melodie did it and did really well. It certainly helped to slow down Lizzie, she races through even though she's 16. I guess that's all for now. The car broke down of course so I don't know if I will be riding Saturday. Next week is French holidays so we are going over Wednesday, Thursday and possibly Saturday for the entire day. We come home around 5:30ish so I might not have time or energy to write those days. I will try to blog key moments. I will search around or take some pics of Mia so i can post them over on here so you can see my gorgeous girl!

1st Competition!

Just finished my first competition in two years! :D :D Got up at 5:15 Sunday morning, got dressed, ate a quick breakfast, and packed up the car. Then we set out on the near two hour drive. The competition was actually pretty small. There was one arena with about 15 trailers parked around it. Most of them only had two or three horses each inside. There was one trailer behind ours with probably eight or ten horses, which interestingly took home all the firsts and seconds of every class. We had six horses.

 Geoff rode five times and did well on most of them. On the third round he knocked a pole down and on the last he fell of. :P

 Louisa did very well on her three rounds. She cleared all the fences every time. Her bay was just great.

Louise only rode twice on her grey but she got a fourth place ribbon and a pen for her first round. Her second round she had a pole down. Her grey looks really great in hunter competition!

Berta did well on her two rounds with Mia. First time was a clear round but the second she missed a fence on the double.

Diana rode once and fell off when her mare refused a fence. We all for some strange reason had a good hearted laugh about it.

As for me I only rode in one class, in the Club 2. The fences were around 60 cm or 2 ft. Mia did extremely well and was pretty easy to handle after her two rounds with Berta. We had a clear round but I jumped ahead of her on jump 8/10 and lost my stirrup, which caused us to fail the second changing leg zone on a diagonal. I did regain control though and finished the last two fences fine. Mia was a star. Overall my score was 63/100 points so although I didn't place, I was rather pleased after not riding for 18 months!

It was EXTREMELY cold and grey. It actually rained a little in the afternoon but then in the evening the sun began to show itself. I rode with Geoff for the first time in the horse truck. We got home at 8:30 and unloaded the horses. Everybody went home and I waited for my parents to pick me up. Had dinner at 10:30ish and went to bed at 11. Woke up at 9:30 this morning. XD

Video is coming soon the hosting website is not working.