On Friday I dressage stewarded for Larkhill ODE. I thought it would be nice to give something back, and it was. I watched 30 or more BE90 tests so well and truely knew the test for my section on Sat and chatted to other lovely stewards, event organisers, and competitors, and was treated to an Easter egg for my troubles. After last weekends stilted and disappointing dressage I really focused on letting Soap go forwards and produce bigger bolder paces, and it worked despite him trying to stare at the XC start all the way through his test we got 31! Our best mark yet, which put us 5th after dressage.
I changed bits and booted up for the SJ and he warmed up like a dream, the best he has ever warmed up so I was actually looking forward to the SJ for once, big mistake! Went in the ring and it was a figure of 8 course on a wonky slope. Soap managed to knock 4 fences down! It was a glitchy course with only 7 clears in our section, but 4 fences down was still ghastly! We have Bovington Intro in 2 weeks so I have booked some lessons with a local SJ-er to help us crack the SJ once and for all, and at Bovington it’s on a surface so it will be interesting to see if that makes a difference. Anyhow now my fab dressage of 31 had 16 to add, and we set out on the XC on 47.
The course was nice and gallopy with a few questions, a corner, a downhill short 1 stride double of off set bullfinches (see 1st one of those in pic above) and an open ditch to a skinny roll top. Soap flew them all as straight as an arrow, and pretty quick too! Optimum time was 5.11 and we came in at 4.31. With no more faults to add we finished 15th out of 43 and beaming with pride. Without our SJ faults we would have been 4th, and even with 2 SJ down we would have scraped 9th! I am determined to crack the SJ and fingers crossed for a much improved round at Bovington. Great result for our 2nd Intro of the season and an improvement of 4 placings on our 1st. He really knows his job now, and we are both loving it. Big thanks to my 7 people strong entourage who took numerous pics and video which I will upload later, and to another fab XC commentator who mentioned my blog and my sponsors thanks to you whoever you were.
