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

2014 - New Year, New Goals

By
This past year was a great year for me and Gadget. Although we had our ups and downs, I've learned a lot this year. We made our third level debut, earned our bronze medal in only two shows, improved the flying changes dramatically, and earned Champion for Adult Amateurs at third level in my GMO.  For 2014, I have several goals: Keep Gadget's back feeling good. I think I have found a good combo of chiro, shoeing, saddle fit, and vet maintenance to prevent him from getting sore rather than waiting until he's in pain. Hopefully it works this year. Continue improving Third Leve l. Last year was a great intro to third level, but I am finally learning to ride Gadget more uphill, which is improving everything. This year I want to try 3-2 and 3-3. The canter-halfpass is still tough for us, but it's looking better. I am going to work to fix things that are easy points -- halts, turn on the haunches, transitions, and good centerlines. I am going to focus on the quality o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Michael Bragdell Clinic

By
So I have been having an amazing summer of lessons with Ryan Yap. He really helped me feel how to collect and energize the canter, which has been the biggest challenge. He also made huge improvements in my halfpasses and helped develop more suspension in Gadget's trot. Writing these things make it sound easy, but it has taken years to get to a point where Ryan could work on these things with us. As he said, we were finally ready. So when Ryan's clinic date changed to one that conflicted with the Michael Bragdell clinic, I was so disappointed. It would have been awesome to have back-to-back weekends of clinics with those two. But I will have to wait until the spring to work with Ryan again.  As for the Michael Bragdell clinic, it was really quite amazing. I typically don't have the highest hopes for lessons when someone is seeing me and Gadget for the first time. We have lots of little issues going on and it sometimes takes a little time figure out the right way to a...
Post a Comment
Read more