amywink April 17th, 2011
I have been woefully behind on writing here but I’ve been preparing for our first show, the Heart of Texas Morgan Club Fun Show, which was this past weekend. It was our first show ever and we practiced as much as we could and came away with some ribbons for our efforts! I was very pleased with both of our performances. I entered 5 classes: The Justin Morgan Standard In Hand Class and all the driving classes, our forte.
Here we are about to head in to the Justin Morgan class:
However, Will decided that the In Hand class was Certain Death and determined to be on Constant Alert, whirling around to face anything behind him, imagined or real. He called and called to Windy, constantly concerned that she’d been consumed and he was next. Now, the Justin Morgan class is judged on how well the horse meets the image of Justin Morgan physically as well as how nicely he behaves. So. While Will *looks* like Justin Morgan, he didn’t behave like Justin Morgan and we placed 4th. Still, it was good practice and we headed back to the stall to wait for the afternoon driving classes while I watched the other classes.
When I returned to the stalls, I found him resting peacefully in the sunshine. Silly horse.
So his freak-out in the morning got it out of his system and he was ready for business.
Our performance in Working Carriage, a class in which the horse is judged for being a pleasure to drive, was quite good and I was pleased with Will as we earned another 4th place ribbon. In the Reinsmanship class, in which the driver is judged, we came away with a nice 3rd place ribbon after performing a figure 8 pattern to determine the driver’s skill. I was very pleased to come away with 3rd place after all our work this spring!
After the classes inside the arena, we moved outside to the cones, where we earned two more 3rd places, with a clean round (no balls down!) and a time of 1:29 in Timed Cones (8 sets of cones), then a much faster 59 seconds in Pick your Own Route! It was a tremendously fun course and I took the same route as the first course, but made a better turn between 6 and 7. Will was quite tired but did his best and I was very proud of him. It was very clear that all our dressage work paid off in each class and the cones course
I’m waiting on other photographers shots for the outside photos so stay tuned!
