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SILVER MEDAL! YAY!

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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. :)

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