2006, a new year, a new beginning. Just fresh out of FL for the winter I felt I was ready to move up to Prelim. Our first prelim was at Mill Creek Pony Club HT at Longview in Kansas City, MO. I drove down with my friends Sydney Turnquist, her parents, Liz & Rolf, and Nicole Zullo. We had a lovely ride down, reading, listening to music, dancing and the usual prank phone calls to our friends. After a great spring clinic with Jon Holling he gave me the "okay" to move up at Prelim. I was so excited and ready to rock!
We got the horses all settled in and helped all the others get settled in too. We had quite the crew from home there! We all went for a hack/dressage school and then settled the horses in for the night. We all had a picnic dinner and BBQ, walked courses and then all went back to the hotel for the night. We had an early morning and my dressage and XC rides were really close together, less than an hour.
Early morning as usual! I got up, got to the farm, fed Hannah, refilled her water and hay and took her for a quick walk to stretch her legs. I tied her up, braided and groomed her so she sparkled. I tacked up and headed to warmup. We had a nice warmup and she felt good, we received at 38.3 on our test! I was very happy with our ride. I walked her back to the barn, untacked, unbraided and re-tacked, studded and geared up. I was ready to attack this cross country course, I only had a few fences I was worried about, a large trakehner (I'm not a ditch person). None the less, we went to warm up and she felt great and we were getting great spots in warmup.
30 seconds....10,9,8,7,6,5 (click watch on),4,3,2,1 HAVE A NICE RIDE, and we were off galloping towards a very friendly first jump! The first part of our course rode great and we were on our way to the large trakehner. She must have felt my hesitation because we had a refusal, I circled her around and flew over it no problems, just goes to show how tuned into me she is! Rode through the next couple of combinations great and then we were coming up to the water. The water was a log, one stride down a bank, bending line to a log IN the water. We jumped in great but when we hit the water she just felt heavy and our impulsion just died and we had a stop at the C element, the log in the water. I trotted her over the log and continued on. Our next problem was at an upbank to a log drop down bank. We jumped up one stride to the log drop down but had a stop at the log drop down. Me not being a good competitor didn't know that I could repeat element A in a combination so I made a tiny little circle on the top of the bank to re-approach the log drop down and had another stop, the second time we made it and ran around our last few fences flawlessly. Of course we racked up the penalties but had an overall great run and we were ready to give it another go at our next show! We had a great show jump round with one stop and one rail, both my fault. Overall finished in 10th with a million penalties...but it was fun and that is what counts!
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