My absence recently hasn’t been due to lack of riding, I can tell you guys that! And since this last weekend included our [soft] move up to Training level, I figured that would be more interesting to capture than the XC at BRHT (though maybe I’ll get back to that).

We signed up for the Training CT at the October War Horse, with the plan of schooling the Training cross country course since Jack hasn’t seen some of the questions that are now at this level. My goal for this weekend wasn’t necessarily to be competitive, but more to focus on building confidence over larger fences and different combinations.

Because of my habit of running around like an idiot these days, I didn’t get to put the time into the dressage preparation that I normally would. There were a few things that were somewhat tricky for Jack, including the 10m circles from B to X and X to E. I wasn’t sure how well we would execute the canter lengthening on the circle, nor the trot lengthening, which would likely be dependent on how loose his back was.

As it turned out, the judge has a bit of yellow fever (is that funny? Probably not) and scored us much better than expected. Though our class was small, our 31.4 landed us in 2nd behind Becky Holder, a longtime idol of mine. [photo of test to come!]

I’d like to encompass all of my learnings from the cross country in a separate post, so I’ll focus on just the CT for now. But let’s just summarize by saying that the dressage seemed somewhat lackluster, but the jumping made up for it all.

The course was actually somewhat tricky in my opinion, with the only straight line being from 3 to 4. All was maxed out in typical War Horse fashion.

I wasn’t sure if the warmup would change as a result of moving up a level, but it didn’t, which ended up being reassuring. Essentially we started over an x, went to a vertical, then an over, and built it up until we were set to go in.

I think this was one of those courses where I found myself actually riding the course, focusing on the balance of his canter while making sure he jumped all the things, because as you’ll see in the video- he wasn’t keen on the mini gates filling the rainbow color fences, and took a hard peek at the liverpool as well.

In the end, our one rail down didn’t change our position in the line up, since everyone had at least one rail in our division. But Jack successfully finished his first Training course, and we are on our way towards really considering ourselves a Training level pair, which is the goal!