Y’all. Guess who’s ELEVEN today?

Oh, and it’s his 11th birthday too.

I’m not typically the type to randomly dress horses in costume, but he is without a doubt the Strangest Thing I know and I couldn’t resist this perfectly timed opportunity. Of course, if you’re not a fan of the show Stranger Things then none of this makes sense. Get thee to Netflix, STAT.

Also please note that I got the Thick and Fluffy waffles, because Henry is both thick and fluffy.

But back to the birthday thing… can we please stop the forward progression of time? I mean… eleven? How did this happen so fast?

He’s so mature these days in a lot of ways, but he still likes to spook at the most boring of inanimate objects and crowhop around the field on brisk days. For example, after our little photo shoot I got on him bareback in his sidepull and we did a quick w/t/c ride complete with half pass, shoulder in, 10m circles, and lengthenings. He was a champ. Then we took a walk down the road and he had a grand time pretending to be terrified of a tree. I couldn’t help but chuckle. He knows when it’s time to be serious and when it’s not, and he definitely makes the most of the “not”.

He remains super weird and full of that trademark goofy personality, pretty much always begging for cookies. Fairly confident that none of those things will ever change, thank goodness. He is totally 100% rotten but it’s okay, he deserves it. Cheeky little shit. I’ve never had a horse quite like him and he puts a smile on my face, without fail, every single day.

Also, for the record, he seemed to enjoy wearing the wig. Gotta admit, he’s pretty cute as a blonde.

Happy Birthday, Henny! Here’s to many more.

My original plan for this past weekend was another Prelim CT at our favorite little schooling venue. Then I realized that Trainer was XC schooling at Pine Hill the same day, so I scratched the CT and made plans for XC schooling instead. Sure, our dressage and stadium need a lot more work, but I will never say no to XC. It’s not in me. That’s like… “Hey do you want to go do hours of advanced calculus and chemistry or would you rather eat cake and win the lottery and take a nap?”. Like duh.

But then it rained a crapton at Pine Hill the day before, effectively shutting down our plans for all things fun, and it was too late to re-enter the CT. Trainer is quick on her feet though and quickly came up with a plan for stadium lessons at a private barn just an hour south of me. Only having to drive an hour each way for a lesson is like a win in and of itself. Plus… let’s be honest… we need stadium lessons. Lots of them. LOTS OF THEM.

I asked for the earliest time slot, since the one hour drive does require me to trek directly across Austin itself. If I’m in and out early, traffic is no biggie. No one wants to be stuck in downtown traffic, especially not with a horse trailer. Still though, I didn’t ride til 9:15, which meant I didn’t even have to get up early since it is literally impossible for me to sleep past 6am no matter what day it is. Plus I was the first and only person into the freshly dragged arena. Plan C was looking better and better.

We kept the jumps small and the lesson simple. As usual, I am overthinking and trying to do way too much. Really I just need to focus on my canter and my rhythm and on being straight and omg stop it with the rest. Doing more than that does not work with this horse or with me. It’s funny, when I was in Katy a couple weeks ago working the Luxe EQ trailer, my old trainer from many years ago (before he moved to Houston) was helping me set up the racks on the first day. He’s married to the shop owner… it’s complicated. Anyway, I told him my stadium was real shitty these days and he said “Well, are you overthinking it and doing too much?”. As usual, he’s like a friggin’ oracle. Always has been. Either that or he just knows me really well by now. I nodded and replied “Yes, of course.”. Clearly this is not new behavior for me. He said “And the horse is actually doing what you tell him, isn’t he?”. I just sighed and nodded. He chuckled and raised his eyebrows, “Yeah that’s not good.”, then launched into his patented Horses Only Know Four Things speech that I have heard many times but obviously have not ever actually retained very well.

My current trainer is in total agreement with The Oracle (as am I), so we really focused on me just sitting and waiting and supporting with my leg, and using my upper body to adjust him. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes not. Doing LESS has always been really difficult for me. I’ve also always had the tendency to shut him down way too much in the turns, effectively ruining my rhythm, so we did small courses with lots of tight turns that forced me to keep riding him forward. If I pulled, they didn’t work. If I kept my leg on and just used my upper body to rebalance, everything came up perfectly. The beauty of self-correcting exercises.

Really, Plan C worked out perfectly. Especially because we were done and pretty much home and unloaded by the time the gross nasty cold front blew through.

BUT WHY IS RIDING SO HARD?

Another spring means another crop of foals coming soon to Willow Tree Warmbloods! It’s been fun doing these contests in the past, so let’s just make it an official annual thing. Ready to place your bets on the class of 2018?

First, you probably want to know what’s at stake here. The winner of this year’s Baby Bets contest will win a $50 Riding Warehouse gift card (everybody say thanks to Riding Warehouse!) and a super cute hat with the Willow Tree Warmbloods logo. Because everybody needs hats to cover that helmet hair. And swag. Always swag.

There are only two foals coming this season, a Laken x Diarado and a Sadie x Diarado. That should make it pretty simple. We’ll do the rules just like last year, since that seemed to work out well (even if it did cause me to have to make a spreadsheet like an adult). Basically all you have to do is exercise those psychic powers and comment here with your guesses for the following, for each foal:

• Foaling Date
• Foaling Time (doesn’t have to be to the minute accurate, just to the hour is fine – ie 2AM. If it happens in the 2AM hour, you get the points.)
• Gender
• Color
• Face Markings
• Leg Markings (again doesn’t have to be specific – “one sock”, “none”, “four socks”, etc will work)

So your submission should look something like this:

Laken: 3/20 3AM black colt with a stripe and two socks

Sadie: 4/21 8PM brown filly with no face white, one sock

But filled in with your actual guesses, of course.

Everything you guess correctly will earn points. 10 points each for foaling date and time, and then 5 points each for gender, color, face markings, and leg markings… so each foal can potentially net you up to 40 points. So even if you get a few things wrong, there are still ways to rack up some serious points. If there are any ties, I’ll put them all in a hat and get Michelle to pick a winner.

Submit your entries via a comment here on this post or you can message them to me on the blog’s facebook page. Just make sure you leave a link or an email address so I can contact you if you win! Easy peasy.

Neither of the mares had fetal sexing done this year, so gender will be a complete surprise. “Due dates” are based on 340 days gestation, but keep in mind that normal gestation can be anywhere from 320ish to 360ish. I’ve included pictures of both combinations below and whatever info is important so you can make your best guesses.

Laken

Laken is a gray mare with two gray parents, although she has never been tested to see if she is homozygous or not. Her first foal was a filly, born brown and turned gray. Diarado is very dark brown, but does not carry a chestnut gene and therefore cannot sire a chestnut foal with any mare. Color possibilities are bay, brown, black (and then maybe gray on top of any of those base colors). Since we may or may not be able to tell at birth if the foal will go gray, please guess the base color. Laken was born chestnut and had a star with faint stripe and one sock before she grayed out. Her “due date” is 3/24, although last year she foaled at 325 days (which would be 3/8).

Sadie

Sadie is a brown mare that has produced one bay offspring and one brown offspring. Her only marking is a right hind sock. Color possibilities are bay, brown, black. “Due date” is 4/22, last year she went 339 days. So far she’s had two colts.

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I’ll leave entries open through 2/23, that gives you two weeks to get your guesses in! The contest winner will be revealed after the last foal is born. Obviously I have no idea exactly when that’ll be, sometime mid-late April, so you’ll just have to stay tuned.

I don’t know how this always happens, but it never fails there are a couple months every spring and every fall where I manage to make plans every single weekend. I realized, as I was entering a Pony Club commitment into my phone’s calendar, that I’ve done it again. My next free weekend is April 14-15. Maybe. So far, anyway.

It’s a mixture of barn-sitting, horse shows, XC schoolings, lessons, Presto-visiting, and then one pesky wedding that is causing me to miss the first recognized show of the season. Why do people keep getting married? And don’t they know they have to do it in the off season? WTF?

Some weekends I’m double booked, with something different both days, like XC schooling up north on Saturday and then doing a sporthorse conformation lecture for Pony Club on Sunday. I was really hesitant to agree to the PC thing at first, I don’t really feel qualified for… most things… but those moms can be convincing. And now I’m oddly excited about that weekend because 1) I’m gonna make that huge weldon’s wall my bitch

and 2) I get to nerd out about confo with a bunch of kids who are probably gonna think I’m legit crazy. They’re not wrong. Wait til we get to the part about LS gap alignment, my favorite! I’ve already made worksheets, naturally. If I’d had college courses with subject matter like this, I probably would have done a lot better. Or at least shown up on time.

The other thing I’m extra excited for is the Presto visit. I haven’t seen him in person since his inspection at the end of September, and by the time I see him again he’ll be just a week shy of his first birthday. Can you believe it? He’s almost officially a yearling! I can’t wait to get up there and put my hands on him and string test him and all that fun stuff. I know he’s not in a particularly attractive phase right now but I want to see him in the flesh, with my own eyes, and get a look at how he’s maturing.

Plus Michelle’s first mare is due kinda sorta around that time, so maybe I’ll get lucky and see a baby?

As far as horse shows it looks like the first recognized will be Texas Rose at the end of March, in which I have vowed to jump that stupid Weldon’s instead of playing it safe and going the long route like last time. We have a score to settle, Texas Rose. After that we’ll just see what works out. I definitely want to get to Holly Hill since I missed both shows there last year, but otherwise I’m just gonna see what sounds good and works out timing-wise. Trying to keep it fluid and low-stress.

There’s already an interesting proposal on the docket for the fall too… of course I’m really gunning for getting to attend Mondial du Lion in France (already have price alerts on the flights), but also a friend of mine wants to look at horses in Belgium a couple weekends later. So like… I should just stay in Europe for a couple weeks, right? Between MdL, looking at stallions, a little bit of touristy crap, and other horse shows, I could easily fill up that time. Therefore I feel like yes, let’s just make it a two week stay.

Surely I’m not the only one who’s already managed to start filling up the year? Anyone else have any fun plans?

Yesterday USEA rolled out a brand new feature to their membership: ERQI ratings. What the heck is ERQI? In USEA’s words:

The ERQI (EquiRatings Quality Index) is a risk management tool that assigns a value to each USEA competing horse. The ERQI is calculated as a probability, a number between 0 and 1, with horses closer to 1 showing statistically higher levels of positive performance in the cross-country phase. ERQIs are displayed on each horse’s profile in a color code representing the level of risk the horse carries on cross-country. The ERQI is built on the ‘data footprint,’ (the past results) of each horse, and applies a marginal gains approach to improving fall rates.

Basically, layman’s terms, Equiratings takes the horse’s record and uses that to decide how likely you are to die on XC at each level. The more you progress up the levels, and the more clear rounds you accumulate at each level, the more boxes turn green and yellow.

• Green/Light Green: Horse at this level is competing with the normal amount of risk.
• Yellow: Horse at this level is competing with a slightly higher level of risk than normal.
• Orange/Amber: Horse at this level is competing with a much higher level of risk than normal.
• Red: Horse at this level is competing with the highest level of risk.

They started a program like this in Ireland a couple years ago and saw a decrease in falls on XC at the higher levels. This year the US is trying it out, and Britain and Australia are supposed to be the next ones up on the docket for some kind of implementation.

The ratings are attached to each horse, not each rider. As a risk-assessment tool, I think it’s pretty neat. In this sport I feel like the more information we have, the better our decisions will be. You can only view the ratings attached to horses that you have shown or own, so they aren’t public.

But what does this really mean? Not much. At this point the ERQI ratings are purely informational and don’t determine qualification for anything. We still have the same qualification criteria for Prelim and above that we had before. So far (the verbiage USEA uses makes it seem like this may change in the future) they’re really just meant to be another data point that riders can use to help them make better decisions on what to enter or where a horse is at development-wise.

Granted, for most of us low level people, it’s a bit inconsequential. There’s also a lot that these ratings can’t take into consideration. It’s looking for clean rounds, and we all know that at the lower levels it’s possible to have a clean round but still be kinda scary. It can also only use results from USEA-recognized shows, obviously, so any results at schooling shows (or shows in Canada, for those near the border) aren’t included. There are definitely holes here, but there are some things that just can’t be measured in data points and probably never will be.

Is the ERQI a be-all, end-all tool that should be used as THE deciding factor for what a horse and rider are capable of? Probably not. Like this thing is pretty convinced that Henry and I would not die if we ran Prelim, whereas I’m over here like “I dunno, I’m like 50% sure that we might.”. So there’s that.

Interested in learning more about ERQI? There’s a handy dandy FAQ page already on the USEA website here.

What do you guys think of these new ERQI ratings? Will it have any influence on your competition schedule? Do you think it’s a useful tool? And, maybe more interestingly, do you think this kind of assessment tool has the potential to spread to other sports in the future (ie jumpers with a “clear round” rating)?