I went looking for the right meme to start off this post before I realized I didn’t really need one, because this picture just kind of sums it up.

I dunno what’s up with the month of June, but it’s swept in here with some bad vibes. Real bad. I dunno if I’m supposed to burn some sage or hire an Etsy witch or what, but my god.

Area Championships went like shit.

Well ok, there were good parts. Which is probably a little more frustrating? Ok maybe not. But uuugggggghhh guys. Sometimes I wonder wtf is wrong with me to revolve my entire life around a sport that only gets harder the more you do it and the higher up the levels you go. Why couldn’t I be obsessed with a sport that involved inanimate objects without thoughts and feelings and bad days of their own? Or like… crochet or knitting or making little felt woodland creatures? Questions I ask myself sometimes.

I have very little media from the show. No one was there with me when I did dressage and there’s only one pro pic I like well enough to buy it but cannot bring myself to spend the money. I actually thought Presto was pretty good for the test. There were no real mistakes, nothing that was a particular whoopsie, it was just one of those where we needed more sparkle in general. Usually for him that ends up getting a 29-31 but this judge was not impressed with us and gave us a 35. Ouch. That’s usually the type of score we get when there is a real mistake or two. To be fair, the judge didn’t like any of us that much and I was still in 2nd after dressage.

XC was 95% the best round we’ve ever had.

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Finally, FINALLY it was really forward-thinking and flowing out of stride and I was seeing things coming forward. Presto was absolutely bang-on at the combinations, even angling some of the skinnies and foot perfect through the hardest water combo he’s seen to date.

So what caught us out? The coffin complex that he’s jumped through about eleventy million times. I still have no real clue exactly what happened. We came out of the turn, there was the A element MIM rail, I rode forward to it, and…. he said nope. I’m not sure if it was the fact that there were a ton of people/cars right around there and he was distracted, or what. Genuinely I have no idea. I even have it on video and me and Trainer both are just kinda like I dunno what the excuse is there. I re-presented and he jumped through super, and went on to absolutely ping around the rest of the course like it was a Novice. Genuinely aside from that moment it was by far our best round not just at this level but maybe ever. Sigh. One of those times when you really wish horses could talk.

We had SJ the next day and he warmed up feeling GREAT. Was jumping fantastic, still seemed fresh and happy and ready to go. Went in the ring, picked up the canter, went to fence 1, and he absolutely just reining-horse slid to a stop at the last second and lawn-darted me in spectacular fashion. Like really spectacular fashion. We checked him out nose to tail and couldn’t find anything wrong, but I had my vet out a few days later to give him a really thorough once over just to make sure there wasn’t something small that we were missing. She spent quite a while poking and prodding and jogging him and checking his eyes and his ulcer points and blah blah blah, I mean shit we even went over his feeding program. Absolutely nothing noteworthy to be found. Which is great because obviously you never want to find an issue, but it just leaves us with more questions really.

He got a training ride and then I did a little jump school on him and he was 100% normal for both. Happy, eager, forward. We took him XC schooling on Saturday and jumped a bunch of ditches and stuff to see if that had anything to do with it and he was literally foot perfect.

So, ya know… anyone’s guess is as good as mine. Myself and my team can’t find anything wrong, nor has he had a bad day since then.

To be honest I was pretty upset about it last week. I do not handle disappointment well (one of the reasons why I don’t ever let myself get that excited about anything… why does disappointment feel so soul-crushing to me?) and it was just incredibly defeating. I’ve been absolutely busting my ass all year, scraping together money to take more lessons and riding whatever I can, whenever I can, and applying so much mental focus and physical effort to be just be better. I feel like me and Presto have both improved massively, so to end up smacked in the dirt at the first jump of SJ was just a huge shock, tbh.

In my head I know that when we choose to do hard things and push ourselves and step outside of our comfort zone, failure is an inevitable part of the process. The best horses and riders in the world still have bad shows or end up in the dirt. I also know, very familiarly, that horses aren’t robots and they have bad days too. Knowing all of that doesn’t make it any less devastating in the moment. My biggest fear is fucking up my horse and it really felt like that’s exactly what I had done. It took me several days to pull myself back from the ledge. But at the end of the day you can either be defeated by failure or you can be motivated by failure, and I dunno about y’all but I’m not a fucking quitter. We’re gonna choose to learn from it, put it behind us (I’m trying to, I swear), and move forward.

That was the very long-winded way of saying that Presto’s summer vacay got delayed a week and actually started this past Sunday. So he’ll get a week off and then very light hacking, then gear back up for some summer stuff. A think a little refresh and reboot will do us both some good (even if he claims he’s terribly dreadfully bored already).

In the meantime, Rubes is starting to buckle down a bit and I’m eyeballing some off-property outings for him. Or I was anyway, until he did this.

By some absolute miracle we managed to get a shoe back on there, but I mean there’s like… almost no wall left. Love that for me considering summer (the season that absolutely murders horse feet in Florida) has barely even begun. I can already tell that me and my farrier are gonna have just a peachy keen time. We’ll see tomorrow if Rubes is sound and then go from there.

In more “the vibes are bad” news (I told you they’re BAD) – there will be no bebe horse for me next year. I was very excited to breed a super nice big TB mare to Cashmere, but it looks like she probably has a bit of an infection that needs to be taken care of. So… I dunno. I already feel like I’m majorly behind the 8-ball as far as “pre-loading” the next horse in my string. Presto is 8, after all, so even a foal born next year wouldn’t be rideable until he’s 13. Now we’d be looking at 14, best case scenario.

Ideally a 10 year age gap between horses would be considerably better (like Henry and Presto, which is perfect), but buying a 2 year old is certainly not in my budget at the moment and probably never will be. I have no solution to this particular conundrum at this time, and for now my Cashmere frozen semen will just sit sadly unused in my storage tank. Also really disappointing and depressing, at least to me, because I was really looking forward to starting the process again with another homebred (the toxic voice in my head went “that’s what you get for getting excited“… ugggghhh).

We did get another mare bred for the WTW program last week though. She gets negative points for ovulating at 1:30am, that’s just the worst timing possible for humans that like to get any modicum of sleep. She better be pregnant. We’ve got another one or two to breed but for the most part breeding season is winding down, and I’m ready for it to be over. It’s getting HOT here and as of right now we don’t have any other barn help besides me, so the farm and it’s 30ish horses are my 24/7 responsibility for the foreseeable future. Having one less thing on my plate would be lovely.

One fun thing at the end of this massive post of shit news: to lift my spirits I took Henry for just a XC round at the POP schooling show this weekend, and it was legit the most fun. He might be 18 but he’s still got it (for about 4 minutes, anyway).

Hopefully everyone else is having a better start to the summer than I am. And uh… if you know of any good ways to fix the vibes, I’m all ears.