Ok, well, I was waiting for recap posts until show pics were posted but turns out they left dressage about 5mins before I went in, and Presto casually loping over Modified didn’t make for any SJ pics worth buying. XC pics aren’t posted yet, hopefully some of those are good. But for today’s portion of the show recap: screenshots it is.

First and foremost, the weather was ick. Like big big big ick. It rained BUCKETS the night before and the morning of, just a torrential never ending deluge. I’m not sure I’ve ever been less enthused to braid and head to a show. Especially because I had multiple friends in town, plus people here trying Argo… it was a lot going on for my brain and it wasn’t super focused on showing. Especially not in the rain.

But, ya know. We’re eventers, we do the damn thing even when it’s soggy and we have no enthusiasm, mostly because we’ve already paid our entry fees and there ain’t no getting it back.

I had Megan coaching me again at this show. She didn’t have anyone else entered so I told her I didn’t really need her until SJ course walk time. Dressage warmup is fairly standard for us by now. Luckily by this point the rain had slacked off enough to where it was more of a heavy drizzle. Granted, we were already super moist, and it was still raining enough to constantly be dripping off my helmet or smearing into my eyeballs. I was very much in “let’s get this over with” mode.

The footing in the dressage rings at Majestic is notoriously not great. They’re grass, but uneven and rutted and tend to be slick no matter what. You may remember this is the place where we had the test last year where Presto legit almost fell down multiple times. I always stud him a little extra for these rings, and I pulled out some bigger ones for this day in particular, having a feeling it was going to not be great. Truth be told, I got in there and mostly tried to avoid the worst spots. I’d rather have a less accurate test and keep my horse out of the muddy corners, so that’s what I did. I definitely left plenty of points on the table when it came to boldness, accuracy, and geometry, but I mostly just wanted to ride a safe and quiet test and keep my horse confident on his feet. It was nothing to write home about, but fine. We scored a 30 to be tied for 4th.

After that I hunkered down in the truck for a while to try to dry off a little bit. Ya know when you got juuuuust wet enough for it to seep through to your bra and underwear? It was like that. Showjumping honestly couldn’t come soon enough.

Megan got there about an hour later, and we headed over to look at the course. It had a couple wonky turns, mostly the one from 1 to 2, but otherwise was standard fare. She reminded me to put my eye on the inside standard through the turn, and then shift my eye to the takeoff as we came out of the corner. She also said I needed to make sure to keep riding him forward, because the footing was really deep and sticky in front of a few jumps, and a little bit of balanced momentum would be helpful. She didn’t want me to get bogged down and backwards (it’s almost like she knows me or something).

We watched a few go and you could definitely tell that the footing was playing a part. It had mostly stopped raining but it was WET WET WET and the takeoff spots in front of some of the jumps were getting deep. Some of the horses dealt with it fine, others seemed to really stick off the ground and require a lot of encouragement. I wasn’t really sure what to expect – Presto has been lucky enough to always jump on pretty good footing. The part I was most concerned about was all the standing water/puddles scattered throughout the course, especially the giant lake in front of fence 2. He’s got a tendency to want to jump over puddles, or at the very least he gets a little “stuck” going through them. I knew I’d have to be ready to ride more positively forward through those spots than usual.

He was a bit of a situation in warmup. Last week at Ocala someone almost ran right into us (and a few other people) multiple times, which freaked Presto out a bit. So when we got into showjump warmup this weekend he was wanting to prop and spin when horses came directly at him. That was super fun. I was trying to avoid traffic as best I could, while also keeping him on the better ground, while also trying to get him positively through as many puddles as possible, while also warming up. By the time we had jumped our last warmup fence he’d stopped wanting to spin so much and wasn’t being as dramatic about the puddles, so… small wins?

Once we were in the ring I trotted him directly to the big puddle of standing water in front of jump 2. That was my biggest area of concern, considering it was already a fairly sharp turn and not a very long approach. He peeked at that puddle but went through it fine, so off we went to the first jump. He was good, but it was just kind of like riding a whole new horse. He was being super genuine about it, but you could tell he wasn’t accustomed to jumping out of that kind of muck and was trying to figure it out. The turn from 1 to 2 rode really well though, I kept riding forward and he mostly ignored the big puddle.

Honestly it all went well until the triple at the very end. I just… missed coming in. Plain and simple. I was a couple strides too late looking at my takeoff spot, so when I did finally look I saw the perfect half stride coming in and didn’t have enough time to fix it. So we had the rail at both A and B. Totally and 100% my fault, I was too slow with my eye. Trying to retrain where I’m looking takes a lot of conscious effort that I haven’t quite mastered yet.

I was really happy with how he was otherwise though. Pretty rideable, and he kept trying for me despite it being a bog. It was character-building for him I think, good for his education to have to jump on footing that isn’t so ideal. He definitely felt like he improved from start to finish in how he handled it, which is all you can really ask for.

All we had on Friday was dressage and SJ, so we were done for the day after that. I left Presto at the trailer with Hillary (his BFF babysitter extraordinaire) so Megan and I could run out and walk XC. I’ll be honest, I was mostly just really really really looking forward to going home and putting on dry clothes. More about XC tomorrow!