Skip to main content

SILVER MEDAL! YAY!

Image
By
So in March, Gadget and I ventured to Lake Erie Winter show to try to get our final score for our silver medal. It was fairly cold weather hovering around 40 degrees, but Gadget was such a good boy. We warmed up Friday evening with Kristin Stein schooling us, and he felt like a PSG horse. Truly, with Kristin's coaching, everything flowed! It was awesome! The left pirouette wasn't great, but everything else felt good. I felt hopeful that evening.

Hani and I stayed with good friend Lauren and her husband Frank at their beautiful home, and we had a blast. Hani will never have accommodations or meals as good as he had at this show. (This is a constant complaint of Hani's -- that I don't feed him at shows and I make him stay at crappy hotels).

On Saturday, Gadget was very stiff during his warm-up. Nearly every left change was late, so I was really struggling. I finally had to goose him a couple times to get the bucks out and loosen up. Lake Erie has a very small warm up, so there was only enough room to school three changes and they could not be ridden very forward. As a result, we rode a very nice, quiet test, but we blew both lines of changes. Everything else was fairly good, though! We felt like we belonged there! And we got a 65%!!!! I picked up my test and ribbon and upon seeing friends in the lounge area and getting congratulations, just saying the words that I had finally gotten my last score for my silver medal made me cry. I was so happy to have gotten this far, so proud of my wonderful little horse, and so grateful to be doing what I love. What a privilege it is to do what we love.


My friend Lauren debuted an incredible freestyle set to a kick ass feminist music theme that brought the house down. We had so much fun partying between our rides. Both of us achieved qualifying scores the first day, so the pressure was off for day two.

On day two, Gadget felt a bit tired and simultaneously tense. He was very fidgety and was a bit tricky to ride. With the goal of getting my tempis, I decided to school them during my minute around the outside of the arena. Gadget got fairly jazzed up,so I sacrificed the harmony factor of the ride, but my tempis felt good. I finally proved to myself that I can actually rode those tempis in the test. Now I need to figure out how to get the counts and keep Gadget from getting tight and testy.

Overall, my lifetime dream of obtaining my silver medal felt just as sweet as I hoped. Gadget has earned some lighter duty for a little while with no shows on the schedule yet. Now I'll just enjoy riding my big, bad silver medal horse. :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When old becomes new - update to my old Pikeur Diana!

By
Here is the finished product! It was a plain black jacket so I added white and light blue trim with RHINESTONES! It's very sparkly! Here's a closeup of the collar, which looks better than the pocket. Now I am going to try to add coordinating trim (minus the rhinestones) to the saddle pad.
Post a Comment
Read more

Catch-up Post -- Putting Together the Puzzle

By
It's been a long time since I have actually written any updates about Iggy. Partly, that is because it is difficult to write about things when you are still very much in the experimental stage. I think I have loved dressage since I was a teenager because of the constant experimenting, strategizing, and problem solving of every ride. I love the intellectual side of it. However, puzzles are more fun when you are making progress toward solving them. They are less fun when you spend a lot of time wondering if you have made progress, stayed the same, or actually screwed things up. From Iggy's first show - trying to keep the big canter in one piece! Iggy is my puzzle. He is a puzzle that makes my eyes light up and my heart sing when I see him. He has this sweet baby face and the personality of a labradoodle. When I look at him, he is everything I ever wanted. Yet, our journey has not been quite as straight forward as I thought it might be. When I sat on Iggy for the first tim...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hard Decisions

By
I wrote the below in mid January but it was too hard to actually finish this post at this time: It has been a long day. After nearly 9 hours in the car for the trip to Ohio State to the equine hospital in PA to home, I am physically and emotionally spent. After getting positive updates the last couple days, I was looking forward to seeing Gadget without the furrowed brow of pain. However, again Gadget was toe-touching lame this morning. It has been 7 weeks that we have been fighting the infection and the pain. He has been through countless procedures, and even when clearly in immeasurable pain, Gadget tries to do as we ask. My emotions have been close to the surface for weeks, but it is when I think of the pain that Gadget has and continues to endure, that I can no longer stop the tears. I want with all of my heart for him to get better and I feel like we have tried everything available - surgeries, 5 antibiotics, countless lab panels, MRI, and more than 4 weeks of hospitalization...
Post a Comment
Read more