Author: Amanda C

Yaaaaaaas, XC!

Ok, really XC was like an hour after dressage on Saturday but I think we can all agree that the best phase deserves its own post, right? Right.

So, to put it mildly, I had some major concerns about the schedule. The only reason I brought my fairly heat intolerant horse to Georgia to horse show in July was because originally XC was supposed to run on Sunday morning. When the schedule got changed and I saw my posted XC time of 3pm, I was extremely unhappy. The cherry on top of all that was a dressage time of 1:40, meaning I had very little time between phases to cool him down, change my shirt, get all his gear on, put studs in, and make the long walk to XC warmup. This is part of why we kept his dressage warmup very light.

I pulled his braids mostly out on the walk back up to the barn and then hit the ground running. He got hosed off and tied in front of his fan while I changed and grabbed my stud kit. Since we had a long morning without much to do, I’d prepped his stud holes before dressage, so all I had to do was pull the plugs out and screw the studs in. I got him booted, tacked, got all my gear on, and hopped back on. Due to all the other ride times in my trainer’s group I figured I would probably be warming myself up, which is no big deal. This is the one phase we can do without hand-holding. I was definitely hoping some of our people would still be stationed at the finish line though, to help me cool him off afterwards. That was my big concern.

We got to warmup, cantered a lap, galloped a lap, did some brake checks, and then hopped over each XC warmup fence (there were 3) once. He had immediately shifted to XC mode and knew it was game on, so after that I just walked and waited to be called to the box.

I have to admit that I kind of blog-failed here and did not get pics of the fences while course walking. Mostly because the first time I walked was at 4pm in the godawful heat and humidity and I really wanted to die rather than take pictures. And the second time I walked I was with Trainer, so I didn’t have time to be dicking around with photos. Sure as hell wasn’t going to walk it a 3rd time just for pics. Sorry fam. I do have helmet camera video though, which I was able to upload thanks to one of the girls having brought her laptop!

The start ended up being a little… hurried. I walked over and they said hi, which I returned, then all the guys resumed their conversation. I was just walking around the back of the start box, waiting for my 30 second warning. When I was at the farthest point of my circle, meandering around on a loose rein, the guy suddenly goes “10-9-8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go!”. I was like SHIT! I scrambled to get my horse pointed the right direction and through the box, one-handed of course, cuz gotta turn on the helmet camera. What I did not remember to turn on (until after jump 5) was my watch. Yeah, so this is now the 3rd Training we’ve run where either I forgot to start the watch or forgot the watch altogether. I am so good at this, guys.

The course started out with a lot of tables. At one point this would have bothered me, but I have plenty of faith in Henry’s ability now, so it was fine. 1 was a basic rounded top thing (technical term), 2 was a table, 3 was a table, then 4 was our first combination: a bench, up and over a mound, then back down to an upright skinny on a slight bend. Pretty sure Henry could have done all that without me. Then we went to another table at 5, a coop at 6, and looped around to an offset line at 7ab. It was tiny and it seemed like the distance worked out for precisely no one (you could see it from warmup) unless you’re really into 2.5 strides. I whoa’d and angled it more to the left side to fit 3 in, because the jumps themselves were pretty small. After that we were off to the Trakehner (which he was ever so slightly sticky off the ground at, which apparently makes me grunt with effort? That sound on the helmet cam video is… amusing.), and another table, before we crossed the road and headed out into the field with the water complex.

Fence 10 was just a small house coming up the hill, then we swung back around left for the water at 11. The A element was a rolltop jumping down into the water, which I knew I would need to ride pretty aggressively since they really couldn’t see the water down there until the last stride or two. From that we just went through the water and out over a skinny little boat thing. Here’s where we had our only truly ugly fence on course. While I actually rode according to plan into the water, I kinda forgot to take a half-halt and rebalance IN the water. He was too long and flat coming out and essentially had to swim over the skinny boat. Which he did happily, because Henny, but still. I could’ve like… helped him out a little there. I know better than that. Thank goodness he’s pretty clever!

After the water we were off up the big hill (seriously, walking up that hill on foot was stupid, but Henry just dug in and sped up it) to a little hanging log, then back down to a cabin where the ground kind of fell away on the landing side.

Then we were finally to the one thing on course that I thought was a nice challenge – a rolltop, right bending line uphill to a good size upbank, then steep downhill left bending line to a corner. These are the kinds of questions that get me excited. Henny tackled it with his typical “lemme at ’em” gusto, completely undeterred, and skipped right through. Halfway down the hill I could see that the distance to the corner was gonna be a bit close so I slipped my reins some, stayed back, and let him find his way. He’s so quick and tidy with his feet that it was a non-issue. (Will try to upload the short clip through this combo, I think the WiFi can handle a small video from my phone… we’ll see…)

That was FUN.

From there we were almost home, and as I turned left to the bending line combo at 17ab, I could see the horse in front of us. I had a quick mental panic, thinking I’d missed some fences or something, but no, I knew I’d gotten them all. (Turned out she’d had 3 stops. Phew.) We jumped through the last combination, then another table, then over the hanging log at the last. I had no idea what my time was, but I felt like we’d galloped along at 460-470mpm, which is pretty much Henry’s cruising speed these days, and the course speed was 450mpm. I was more than prepared to slow it way down if he felt like he was struggling in the heat, but he really was just on cruise the whole way. We ended up right on the money with time – coming in 17 seconds under Optimum.

My only disappointment is that there was no one there at the finish to help me pull tack and get him cooled down, so I had to walk a very hot horse a very long way back to the barn before I could start bringing his temp and resp rate down. Hopefully next week we’ll have more hands on deck for that.

The course was a little on the simpler side I thought, but a nice way to ease into a new venue. Everything rode pretty well aside from my own snafu out of the water. Hopefully we can build on that next week! As usual, I really couldn’t be happier with the horse I had on cross country. Add another double clear to his record!

So much has happened since I last posted on Friday morning that I don’t even know how to cover that much ground anymore. Plus it feels like Friday was a lifetime away. So I’m just gonna try to do a show recap as best I can, broken up so that it doesn’t end up being a total novel. Fair warning though, I can’t get my videos to upload on the farm wifi, and the pro photos that I bought (all of them. I literally bought all of them. I have self control issues.) are gonna take 2-3 weeks. So, like… enjoy the grainy blurry screen caps? There’s not a lot I can do about that at the moment. Real media will have to come later.

As you may recall, we left off with Henry being a bit of a dragon during our attempted runthrough of the test on Thursday. I decided to get back on him early Friday morning before we left, just to try to get his brain stuck back in. We did a lot of walk, from on the contact to stretchy and back again a bunch, then same thing at the trot. After about 15 minutes he FINALLY took a deep breath and settled, so I quit with that. Sometimes he just needs a mental re-calibration if he feels like he’s been under a lot of pressure (this horse has a lot of feels in general, let’s be honest).

Then we loaded up and were on our way to Chatt (I like how it sounds fast and easy in that one sentence but actually took almost all day). Once we settled in and unpacked, we all got on for a short dressage ride. Luckily they still had all the dressage rings open, which was REALLY nice. I didn’t ride him inside any of them, but we rode around outside of them for a while. He was being super good so again we kept the ride short, but he sometimes sees monsters around the dressage rings so it was great to let him trot around them and get his snorts out. Especially because there was a blue barrel at the fence line at the end of ring 1 (our ring of course) that he was ready to call the cops about. That thing was clearly up to no good.

Since the 2-ride thing worked so well on Friday, we decided to try that tactic for Saturday as well. I’ve never done any kind of “pre-ride” approach with him before, but… worth a shot? So I swung up around 7 and repeated the same type of ride as Friday morning. He was SUPER, felt really great and relaxed, so we were out there for all of 10 or 15 minutes. Just enough to settle him, basically.

Our dressage wasn’t until 1:40 (UGH waiting around all day is the pits) so we had a slow and casual morning of braiding and cleaning and getting stuff ready and making sure I actually remembered the test. I got on him around 1:20 and headed to warmup, where he was great again. A little more on edge than in the morning, of course, warmup is never exactly calm, but still really good and rideable and “with me”. We did maybe 10 minutes of work and then just walked and let him relax. One of the big keys to Henry is knowing when to quit.

When we went down to our ring he definitely tensed up a bit. He knows what this dressage thing is all about, and he’s still extremely skeptical of it. BUT, I have to say, despite some tension he was so much more rideable in this test than I think he’s ever been. He’s finally starting to let me “go for it” and actually show him a bit, rather than skate through in “dear god just don’t have a meltdown” mode.

Don’t get me wrong, he was not totally transformed and rideable the whole time. Definitely not. He had a couple of borderline moments, for sure. The second canter lengthening was sketchy, one of the down transitions from canter to trot was more of a “plop”, he took one teeny step back with a front foot in the halt which knocked that score down to 5 (OUCH), and those 10m half circles are a bit tough when your horse is tense. But what excites me is that he was able to come back from each mistake and re-focus. Test A is a much more difficult test for him, with the canter coming so early. He tends to be pretty wired after that, but this time he was more willing to take a breath and stay with me throughout.

I really had no idea how it would score, but I also didn’t care. I was pleased with the progress he showed and the effort he made, and so was Trainer. It’s baby steps with this horse when it comes to dressage, and I’m happy with any forward progression. But not gonna lie, I was also happy when a barnmate told me we were sitting 5th on a 34.5. For this horse, doing that test, at a bigger show in good company, I was pleased with that. It’s certainly better than 9th or 10th on a 38 or so, our more typical position after dressage.

Either way, phase 1 was done! And I had a XC start time of 3pm, so the hustle to completely change gears was on…

You know what’s great after you’ve been awake for 41 hours? 9 1/2 hours of sleep. I got in bed to read at 8:30pm on Wednesday night and think I made it about a paragraph down the page before I passed the hell out. And that was my status all the way until 5:58am the next morning, two minutes before my alarm went off. It was fantastic.

I fed the horses, turned everybody out, and then went exploring around the property. I found the cross country jumps, and the pond, and then walked up the driveway to take a pic of the barn in the early morning light. It’s so nice and quiet and peaceful here. It was way better than your typical Thursday morning for me, that’s for sure.

Everyone else showed up around 9:30, and I got on Henry for a quick run-through of the dressage test. Or tried, I guess. He was tense and pissy and just kind of a monster in general. A sassmonster. He felt like that awesome combination of wild but behind the leg. Everyone’s favorite thing to ride. Yay.

By this point it was stupid humid and getting pretty hot, so I made it through the test once, got a couple good moments, and called it done. Some days things just don’t go the way you want them to. No point in getting Henry even more worked up and end up making it worse or getting him overheated. It took me a while to get him cooled out as it was.

After everyone else got done riding and we got the barn cleaned up, the others left to go back to the house they’re staying at. I ate lunch, grabbed my book, and enjoyed some A/C for a while.

And then, right on cue again: the rumble of thunder. Except this time the horses were already inside, so I didn’t have to do a repeat of the Tough Mudder Sprint from the day before. Thank goodness, because I don’t have that in me again for a while.

But that storm blew in like a wrecking ball. The barn shook, stuff went flying, the power flickered on and off a few times, and the WiFi went out (nooooooo not the WiFi!). I headed downstairs to check on the horses and make sure everyone was ok, and found a whole bunch of random stuff blown all over the place from the wind. I shut the end doors, picked stuff up, and confirmed that all the horses were indeed just fine.

Then I got distracted cleaning my tack and sweeping all the different rooms out. I’m a total piddler when you leave me alone in a barn with nothing better to do. Everyone else came back out to help feed dinner, and the rain just kept going. We got a solid 3+ hour shower, enough to dash our plans for night turnout.

After that I just ate dinner, read my book, checked on the horses one more time, and went to bed (early, again, because I’m a total old lady). It was a pretty relaxed and chill day overall, which is nice since tomorrow is when everything gets really busy again as we pack back up and head over to Chatt for the show. Having a calm day sandwiched in between a bunch of craziness is much appreciated. It was a very welcome chance to catch our breath, rest up, and let the horses de-stress from the drive out here.

Happy Friday everyone! We’ll pick back up on Monday with a show recap… hopefully I can keep the Sassmonster at bay.

Y’all… did you know that it’s possible for one day to be 41 hours long? It’s true. That was my Tuwednesday.

After a long, busy day at work on Tuesday, I went home and packed my stuff, then went to the barn and packed Henry’s stuff. Then I spent a really long time saying bye to Presto (I MISS HIM ALREADY 😩), loaded Henry in the trailer, and drove south to rendezvous with my actual ride to Chatt. We unpacked everything from my truck, loaded it into theirs, got all the horses in, and were on our way out of Austin by 10pm, with the goal of meeting up with the rest of our caravan at 1:30am, south of Houston.

I thought maybe I’d be able to doze a bit in the car but yeah no. Apparently when you start to get old, things don’t bend the same way anymore. My back couldn’t take the weird positions that are required for car sleeping, so I didn’t get so much as even a wink.

We stopped again at 4:15 in Louisiana, at which point I took over driving from Trainer. That’s pretty close to when I normally wake up anyway, so I was starting to feel perkier right as she was starting to crash. I drove on across Louisiana through sunrise, and then bam – shredded tire. I pulled off the highway into a parking lot and trainer acted like she was auditioning for NASCAR pitcrew or something… she had that thing changed in like 10 minutes. It was quite impressive. I wish I had videoed it.

After that, everything started blurring together. The cities, the states, the hours… omg. By 11am or so I think delirium was starting to set in, but I wasn’t feeling particularly tired. It’s like my body went “well I guess sleep isn’t a thing we’re doing” and moved on to the next day. Like Europe jet lag but way more boring.

We weren’t actually going straight to Chatt since the show isn’t til this weekend. Instead we’re spending a few days at a really nice farm outside of Birmingham, so the horses can relax and enjoy some turnout after their long trip. We’ve got a covered, a dressage arena, a jumping arena, trails, and some XC jumps. The barn is GORGEOUS. And since it’s for sale, it’s currently empty, meaning we have the entire place to ourselves.

All the horses unloaded great, and after a few minutes in their stalls to settle and drink some water, we turned them out in the nice grassy paddocks. Henny took one look at that grass and was like “bye Felicia”. 14 hours in a trailer will do that, I suppose.

We got ourselves organized in the barn, and then everyone else left to go to the house they’re staying in (about half an hour away) to shower and relax for a bit. I’m staying in the apartment above the barn (because 1. I am the anti-social grump of the group, 2. I’m always up really early anyway, so it makes sense for me to stay here and feed the horses in the mornings.) which is really nice. I took a shower, sat on the couch, and immediately felt myself falling asleep. I didn’t want to nap for too long so I set an alarm on my phone for 45 minutes later, closed my eyes, and I was out like a light.

Twenty minutes in, a distant rumble jolted me out of my nap. I was so discombobulated when I woke up that it took me a minute to remember where the heck I even was, and then I heard a rumble again, but louder this time. I opened my weather app, swore loudly, and leaped for my shoes, slamming my feet into them as I took off down the stairs. Some storms had popped up out of nowhere and were coming fast.

I bolted out to the paddocks, grabbing Henry and the horse next to him. I ran back up the hill with them, threw them in their stalls, and turned to run back out. Right then the sky lit up like the 4th of July. I haven’t seen a lightning show that impressive in a long time. I stopped in my tracks. I still had 6 more horses out, but there was so much lightning that I couldn’t even find a break in it to make a mad dash.

I paced the barn aisle for a few minutes, waiting for a lull, and finally got enough of one. I sprinted like I don’t think I’ve ever sprinted before, grabbing both of Trainer’s horses and running back up the hill with them. Then I had to wait for another lull, dashing back out and grabbing the draft cross and the pony and running THEM in. Now I was sweating, soaked, and freaked out. I hate lightning. A lot.

The two horses left out were down at the bottom of the hill, sort of behind some other paddocks. I bolted down there, leaping over a fallen board and landing ankle deep in mud. When I kept running I realized I was missing a shoe. Screech to a stop. Run back. Grab shoe. Jam bare muddy foot back in and keep running. I wrangled the last two horses (who had little interest in my urgency) and dragged them up the, by now, very long never-ending hill into the barn.

My freaking god. It was like a warrior dash or spartan race or something. I was soaked, muddy, and it felt like I sprained basically everything from the waist down. I do not recommend any of this when you’re running on literally 20 minutes of sleep in the past 36+ hours.

By the time I got the horses in and settled, everyone else arrived to help. We fed, tucked the horses in, I had a very glamorous dinner of cheese and crackers, and then I basically collapsed and died.

So ya know… day 1. Never a dull moment.

By the time this post is published on Wednesday morning, we should be on the road – and hopefully at least half the way – to Chatt! Or actually, our “home” farm for the week near Birmingham. The plan was to leave Tuesday night around 10 and drive overnight (we have plenty of people to switch out shifts) so that the horses don’t roast in the trailer. Henry the delicate flower appreciates that, I’m sure.

This whole trip kind of snuck up on me. Between the MCP show the weekend before last and then Presto’s FEH show last weekend, I have not focused on Chatt at all. Like 0%. I didn’t even start packing until Tuesday afternoon, right before I needed to leave. I have no idea if I got everything, probably not, but hopefully I at least remembered the essentials. (YES MICHELE I GOT MY SADDLES, YOU A-HOLE. That was ONE TIME.)

I have no real plan for this whole excursion at all, since I’m basically along for the ride. I have no scheduled posts in the queue, so if anyone is actually interested I can try to do daily updates from my phone app like I did for Coconino. I’m not sure if y’all care about that or not. But basically I’m not back til the 9th/10th, so everything else besides the Henny adventures comes to a screeching halt.

I was excited to check the mail on Monday and see that a TraumaVoid EQ3 helmet arrived just in time to make the trip with us. Thanks Riding Warehouse! Yeah I know, I just got the One K, but I have to be honest… I don’t really love it. I expected to love it, because it seems like everyone that has one does, but the fit is weird on me, it looks huge, and for some reason it makes sweat drip like a faucet directly into my left eye. The air flow is decent though, and I like the dark brown color. It’s wearable, it’s just definitely not my favorite, so I’m glad I got it cheap.

The EQ3 though, which I was concerned I would NOT like, given the mixed reviews of the fit/profile that I’ve heard so far… I like a lot. The fit is definitely better, and I think it makes me look less bobbleheaded than the OneK. Not as flattering as my Samshield, but I mean, I DO have a big ol’ melon so I always looks bobbleheaded to some degree. The MIPS layer is really interesting too. So the EQ3 made it into my trunk to take with us, and the OneK got left at home. We’ll see how it handles the Southeast heat and humidity. Stay tuned.

OH – one last thing while I’m thinking about it! The Central FEH Championships is still looking for sponsors. I know a lot of business owners are readers, so I’m throwing this out there for you guys (or for anyone who might want to sponsor privately, I suppose). Link to sponsorship info/form is here: Central FEH Championships. This is the first year for a Central championship and it looks like it’s going to be fairly well attended, so hopefully we can make it a good one!