Brookside: Saturday

My favorite part of moving up to the 2'6" division were the fun mini-medals we got to sign up for!

Saturday was a schedule flip from Friday- my group was the very last to go at the end of the day. And then the rings were running long....like an hour over. Until all of a sudden they weren't and it was a hustle. Hurry up and wait is not my forte. But I had visualized my SAHJA mini-medal course all day and actually decided to ride that course before going in for my Warm Up over Fences and third Hunter round.

In my fantasy visualization I had marked all of my breathing checkpoints, we caught every distance, and came out of the ring to rousing applause.

In real life I missed to the first fence, stuck my spurs into Ellie's sides to get more pace, and then realized we had a halt directly after fence 1. Whoops. We did still get some applause though!

We had better luck in our outside lines but that gray diagonal line got us every time. At the end of the courses I wasn't delighted. I was tired. But given the chance to debrief with Ali we found some good things in the rounds.

As the videos show, Ellie was generally a sport despite being accidentally spurred, pulled on, laid on, etc. We had a few wiggly baby moments in the gray lines, a naughty swap, and VERY arrow-dynamic ears- but still fun-ish!