Planning and Reviewing

Whew. The end of my school struggles (at least the big pressing ones) will be over November 24th. I will be finished with my preliminary exams, and I can mentally rest easy. The basal level of stress the last couple of months has been high. I initially decided to be finished by October 22nd, but some procrastination/miscommunication pushed the date back a month. Anyways, I try not to blow up my horse blog with too many work struggles, and so back onto the horse things. The end of some major stressors means I can get really excited about some competitions coming up.

So lets recap 2014 for Knots and I. I know, I know, 2014 isn't really over yet.

High Point Derby was close, cheap, and simple. So we decided to school their xc course a few weeks before then go to the event. Well the schooling didn't pan out due to repeated rain, but we showed up for a cold windy event with our game faces on. Jellybean live tweeted the event, which was summarized here.

As you may recall, we were eliminated at this show after dressage, since I jumped out of the arena. So we tucked that disappointment away and started focusing on our dressage skillz. More lessons.

Topsider Dressage Show
So we decided to go to a specific show to focus on our dressage and practice not jumping out of the arena. It went well! We won a first and third place, and posted some good starting point scores. We recapped the show here.

Pine Hill July
Our next and last show was Pine Hill! This was a real schooling horse trials and very exciting. We ran goldilocks, and managed to win second in our division. We mostly finished on our dressage score, adding just a few time penalties on cross country. A full recap is here. It looks like we never actually posted any pictures... but  can link some videos: Stadium and Dressage.

And that really wrapped up our intro year. Basically only three shows, due to money and time. I feel good moving up to BN (with some extensive conditioning) and I am pumped about what we are going to do next. I think I'll add an addendum with the plans, because I am out of time!