OTTB Charm

Sunday morning brought show jumping day! We arrived nice & early so I could give him a long warmup if he still was a bit spicy. We got tacked up quickly and wandered over to the warmup. Only 2 other people were in there, so it was pretty quiet! Banner was forward and happy to play! Not the slightly insane forward we had the day before, but a lovely, quiet forward that was so fun to ride and we got some fantastic warmup jumps with great distances! I decided to quit while it all felt awesome, so I headed over to the main ring and went over my course a few more times. It was a nice, loopy course that gave us a good amount of challenge without being too crazy. We ended up going 3rd (I wanted to watch a couple other people go around just to be able to watch the course and learn it a bit more). I gave myself a mini pep talk "do NOT micromanage him, just let him do his job!". We picked up a lovely canter and headed to the first fence, and I stuck to my plan. Square turn...

This weekend brought around another one of our local schooling shows! I entered Banner in at Novice again, as he definitely needs more & more practice doing that level. He is laughably bored at BN, but still just a bit intimidated by some of the Novice questions, so its a great learning experience for him each time we get out. In our recent show jumping lessons with Trainer C, we have finally unlocked a new level with Banner. He is finally feeling confident & schooled enough at the 3' level that I need to stop "helping" him as much (okay, lets be real, I need to stop micromanaging him). It is super  hard for me to learn to just almost sit there in a supportive role for him. I do my part, trying to set him up well & give him a fair chance to make a good decision, but now I need to let him take some of the responsibility. Banner is loving this new balance we have struck. When I finally stopped fidgeting with him as much, you could almost hear him sigh ...

Heading into day 2, Banner & I were sitting in 1st place! But to be honest, I had no expectation of keeping that placing or anything, and I was not worried about the placing we got at this show. Right now at Novice, XC is sort of our weakest phase. Banner eats up the galloping fences (rolltops, tables, steeplechase, etc.), but some of the tougher questions (1/2 coffins, trakehners, etc.) still back him off a bit at this height. Unfortunately for the barn that puts on these shows, their tractor broke, which didn't allow them to move any of the XC fences, so our cross country course was the same as it was in July . Part of me thought "whomp whomp..." because this didn't mean really any new lines or new challenges (they did add one up bank out of water, but that was it). But then I thought about it and actually this was perfect! I knew the mistakes I made last time and we had done some XC schools to improve our weird ditch issue. The course being exactly the s...

Okay, first off, I must preface this by saying that I am officially the worst  blogger & this show happened nearly 2 weeks ago and I am just now blogging about it. Whoops. Oh well, better late than never, right? So we went ahead and decided to enter Novice again at our local little schooling show! We are consistently schooling around that height in our lessons and its feeling better and better, I just need to keep learning how to make better decisions! Because its a smaller schooling show, we ran some of the divisions out of order, so I did SJ first, and then Dressage later in the morning. I'm sure for some people in my group that made a big difference (either good or bad), but with Banner it really makes no difference for us. Since Novice is technically 2'11" max, they put us in the 2'9" group instead of 3' just to keep it under max height. 2'9" is the first class of the day that they run (mostly so the people jumping the bigger ju...

This weekend Banner & I participated in another one of our local schooling shows! We decided to enter the Novice HT round + a couple of 3'0" show jump rounds. Saturday morning bright and early, we pulled out of our driveway (sometime around 6:30am?) and headed off to the show. Our ride time for dressage was around 7:45am, so I managed to get tacked up & on him by 7:10am. We got some good warmup time in the nice arena which is technically the jump ring warmup, but the footing is better there, so I wanted to spend more time there than in the dressage area. We headed over to dressage at 7:30 and of course we were already a couple of minutes behind schedule, but it kicked off pretty well after that. I forgot to fly spray his ears and there were a lot of gnats, so I lost some focus once we got over to the dressage arena unfortunately, but Banner was still mostly a good boy. I forgot how stupid deep the footing is in that dressage arena and so I decided to just...

This weekend, our local barn hosted their first ever true schooling HT. It was a 2-day show, with dressage & SJ on Saturday, and XC on Sunday. Banner and I signed up to do the Beginner Novice! Our dressage test was mid-morning, and there was a storm threatening all day on Saturday. It was definitely brisk, and it was getting to a few of the horses, but Banner came out true to his unicorn status and warmed up like a champ. We are working on improving his transitions, and he gave me some of his best yet to date. His downwards tend to be a bit abrupt, and his upwards tend to start in the front with his back legs struggling to catch up, but on Saturday we got most of our transitions in great form - fluid and smooth! He stayed relaxed and rhythmic in our test and gave me some great work. Our upward canter transitions could have been better, and our free walk could have been stretchier, but I was pleased with our test, and excited about the fact that I still think we have so mu...