Good ponies all around today! Poor Fender worked very hard on Friday, as it was viciously windy and he had quite a bit of whee…which meant he was pretty schnookered yesterday. I’ve never found the bottom of him at home, but he can get very tired at the shows. Just overwhelmed, I think. We did training 3, and he was quiet and obedient and fairly supple but had very little go and was really squirrely in the contact. He’s not so reliable in really TAKING the right rein anyway, but he struggles with it more when he’s not in front of me enough.
Oddly enough, the judge gave us an 8 on impulsion (hey, fake it ’til you make it), but a 5 on submission (ouch) and a 6 on rider (OUCH! what the heck?). A 64 percent was respectable enough, but I’m bummed. We’re a long way from Williamston! Good news, though: An 8 on gaits means that hopefully when we’re back in five weeks to do the Young Horse tests, he’ll score much better in that format. I know I need to make some major improvements both to his fitness and to his connection to improve that submission score, but the gaits scores should be OK.
At the end of the day, he’s still not yet 4, and he made a MAJOR in-arena attitude adjustment from the last show, and I didn’t buy him to be a superstar training level horse—I have my eyes on the bigger picture. So good boy, Fender!
Ella was terrific. Today’s class was just a warm-up for tomorrow’s qualifier, so I intentionally had a light warm-up. I want to make sure I still have plenty of horse in the tank for Sunday. So walk, trot, canter, a little piaffe, and a focus on the trot-passage transitions; in Williamston I felt like we never got to show off her real passage in the Brentina test.
It paid off—the first transition to passage was the best it’s been, and the best she knows how to do. She received 8s from both judges, huzzah! I thought the piaffe was lackluster, but they didn’t seem to mind so much. The trot tour was a bit on the muscle (no warm-up will do that to you), and the left canter pirouette was fairly terrifying AND not where it was supposed to be (on purpose—it comes up fast, and she’s learning it’s location, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to school it a little so she doesn’t stop, duck and turn), along with her usual yucky collected walk and a typical fatigued last centerline.
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BUT no mistakes, not even in the ones. Some really beautiful details—a 9 on my first centerline, 8 on my extended canter, a few 8s on transition scores; stuff that has nothing to do with quality of gaits and everything to do with quality of training (hey, it’s my blog, and I’ll pat myself on the back if I want to). And she finished tired in the muscles, but with a perky yet relaxed brain.
Could it be that Ella is becoming reliable? Amazing! 65.5 percent, and this panel of judges is MUCH more like what we’ll be seeing at Gladstone in August. If she’s getting 65 percent this early in the season on a deliberately conservative ride…ooh!
So more of the same tomorrow, training 3 for Fender in which we will attempt to take BOTH reins, not just one, and the Brentina Cup for Ella, in which I will prepare for the pirouettes better. I still want to focus on the passage transitions over the piaffe, because I think that’s more about obedience to the aid, whereas the piaffe is still about strength, and I’m not going to fix that in one day.
And amazingly enough, the sun is STILL shining, and there’s STILL no rain or snow! Maybe someone sacrificed a goat to the weather gods.
