As I mentioned yesterday, even though our score was much higher than normal, we were somehow sitting in 2nd place after dressage. These one day events really fly by though, and with under two hours between dressage and the jumping phases, and with tack to attend to and a stadium course to walk, there really wasn’t much time to ruminate on our placing.

Sorry, no photos! Screengrabs instead!

Foster decided once again he would warm up for stadium half awake, surely in an effort to make sure my calves were in working order. All kidding aside though, I seriously need to find a way to get him revved up for the stadium phase, because these pokey warm-ups just aren’t cutting it. Anybody have any suggestions for getting a horse forward while conserving energy?

Blurry photo is blurry

Thankfully he tends to get his motor running in the actual show arena, and I took a big lap around the course so he could see everything and hopefully get excited.

Even with the two poles, I feel like this is one of our better stadium rounds, at least regarding fluidity. I got stiff to fence 2, which he knocked, and I didn’t balance him as I should to fence 5. But there are some positives- I like my turn from 4 to 5 (why did I not ride every turn like that?) and I didn’t get any nasty chippy spots like I tend to do. Also, an actual flying change! But in retrospect, I should have really gotten that simple change faster (ugh), properly balanced before every fence, and not made my turns so sweeping.

Wish I had a photo of this one!

So with 8 jumping faults and 7 time faults to add to our score, we dropped a bit down the leaderboard. While we really should have done better than that, there were plenty of other victims of flying poles, and I tried not to stress over losing a ribbon. We still had cross country to run!