Thursday 29 August
Fred and I quietly headed out for our first one day event together, his first one ever and my first one in EIGHT years. I went for the 60-70cm option because although we have schooled over bigger fences, I hadn't yet done a course on Fred, so I wanted the height to be kind of irrelevant.
And the boy absolutely aced it. Almost coming home with 2nd but through no fault of his, coming home with 8th.... here's how the day unfolded:
We got a 30.77 dressage (our best score yet) - we got 8 for our free walk (double scorer) and I got 7 for rider position and 8 for rider effectiveness!!! Wow! That must have been because he was desperate to spook at the fence marking the edge of the arena and I wouldn't let him.
He then ticked round the show jumping in a nice rhythm to go clear, keeping us in second place before cross country.....
Fred warmed up really brilliantly for the XC and surprised me ahead of the start box by being as cool as a cucumber... and that attitude continued on course! As we turned from jump 5 xc down the hill to jump 6, I may have had a couple of tears when it dawned on me that thanks to Fred I was finally back out doing this again! This was closely followed by Fred tripping downhill which brought my focus back sharply!
We stormed round, over the skinny log, through the owl hole then attacking the water - which although we hesitated at, Fred leapt in - and we flew round to jump 11, 12, 13..... Suddenly we found ourselves on top of a rider who'd stopped right in front of us at fence 14. I may have screamed a little wildly "coming through", followed by "you have to move", followed by "sorry, I don't mean to be rude"... but we got all caught up together and with my and Fred's focus momentarily lapsing we also had a stop, which also included him bumping his nose on the flag and wondering if he should jump, to which I said 'er, no, not from here!' As we turned away from the fence, I looked at the other rider and said well shall I go now or are you? She shrugged, so I turned again, and with the other horse now out of the way, he flew straight over it and romped home.
The stop dropped us from 2nd to 8th and out of the placings. But I was delighted with Fred and it was amazing to think that without the unfortunate blip with the other rider he would have stormed round to bring us home a 2nd place is our first ever one day event!! 🥰
And you know, I know I'm a bit rusty and I'll know next time to react differently.
Unfortunately, because we whipped round and caught the other rider up, the only pro pics of us were of the water :-/ still.....
Massive massive thanks to Jayne for her help in getting us to this point through all our training. But also for keeping us so chilled at our events, helping us focus at each phase, videoing and just generally being a fabulous support.