Meet George! ( you'll have to scroll to the bottom for pictures since I haven't figured out how to put them in the middle of my posts with the blogger app. The joys of not having wireless at home) George is a 10 year old, 17.2h Clydesdale-Arabian cross. He is owned by my trainer's good friend, Karla, and he is magnificent. Before Monday, I had only ridden him twice. Ever. And one of those times was Saturday, 2 days before the trial! I know you probably think I'm NUTS (which may or may not be true) but George is a very sensible guy. His mom has done a fab job giving him a substantial dressage background, so it was fairly easy for me to just get on and go. Jumping? Well that's a little bit of a different story. He had apparently been popped over some little things at one point in his life by Karla's daughter, but that's about it. The first 2 times I rode him our jumping consisted of 4 fence rails and 2 mounting blocks. Lol. He was game and seemed brave, and since we were only planning on doing a combined training and schooling xc after, I figured the little starter cross rails they had had at this event last year would be no problemo.
Monday morning:
We headed to Bucks County, me with all my gear and the boy in tow (gasp! horses AND boys?!) and Karla and Megan bringing George from far away Pine Grove, arriving about 11 to have plenty of warm up time for our 1:10 test. Big surprise, it's raining. Same as last year. Crud. After a very lengthy warm up, we're talking over an hour of trotting at about mach 50 while trying to avoid little kids on tiny ponies who can't steer and pay attention to their instructors at the same time, we head up to do our test. The judge gives is some constructive criticism, to keep his ears as the highest point and not let them drop below his neck and to free up his shoulder for more expression, we head back to the trailer to untack and retack for stadium.
Every horse trial I've been to we've always had a ridiculously long break between dressage and stadium, usually close to two hours. This day, we had about 20 minutes to get back down to warm up over fences before they lowered the jumps to intro level at 1:45. AAHHHHH! Luckily, with the help of Megan and Karla, and Jared (the boy!) running to the booth for a copy of the course since I didn't have time to walk it, we managed to get both of us in our jump gear and to the warm up ring in a timely fashion. We popped over the warm up jumps, and feeling mostly prepared, headed over to take our turn. Even in the pouring rain I can see that they are ALL verticals. With flowers and other scary fill. George had never seen any of that stuff before. Our goal was no refusals. Do everything at a trot and make it a good experience.
He blew me away. Not once did he feel like he wanted to stop or run out. He didn't even glance at the flowers or bright colored rails. We had one spooky moment as we were coming up to a single on the rail where they had stuck the bigger flower boxes along the outside of the ring that were apparently going to eat him, but he composed himself and continued on.
When we finished I had the biggest smile on my face (apparently it was also there through the entire course) and plenty of pats and good boys for George. Afterwards we headed out on the xc course with Ashley and her new tb Quincy, who was also doing his first CT, to school a little in the rain. Both horses had no problems with the jumps we pointed them at, but the big scary ones they had to trot past before and after made it interesting.
The whole day was a terrific experience for everyone. We finished in 2nd on our dressage score of 33.5 with high hopes for a full horse trial in October. Yay George!
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