Hurricane Irene couldn’t stop the Loudoun Hunt PC Horse Trials this past weekend. We lost power on Saturday night, but didn’t get too much rain or wind, and Leesburg got less. The event made the decision to start two hours later on Sunday. It cleared out and ended up being a beautiful day. The footing was decent for the jumping, but the dressage rings were a bit sticky. Our dressage wasn’t our best. I think we both felt a bit out of balance in the warmup because it was uneven, and the grass ring was even worse. He tensed up a bit after the free walk and into the trot and canter. We still ended up with a 29.1 and were in first after dressage.

The show jumping course was quite twisty and hilly, but he jumped well up until the last fence. It was a decent 6 strides, but I took back too much on take off instead of softening and we had it down. It was on a slight downhill approach headed towards the out gate. Apparently a lot of other people had it down too.

The cross-country course was nice and open and gallopy. I’ve never competed him here (but have with Sam), so it was fun to do something a bit different. There was a good bank complex with a narrow brush after a drop down. He was on the wrong lead headed towards the roll top, then after the drop I just took back too much and the brush was ugly. I needed to just let him go to it and trust him. There was a pretty decent side coffin that he did very well and a trekehner at the bottom of a hill that he didn’t bat an eye at. The water was in the woods, so it was different than what we’re used to seeing. It was a bank up, three strides to a roll top. We took a bit of a long one to the bank, but the roll top worked out well. Overall, we had a really nice go. We ended up third in Training Rider and finally earned our third score under 35 to get our USEA training level gold medal.

We had a camera malfunction, so didn’t get  the show jumping, and the cross-country was so spread out that my dad only got the first two and last fences.

I’ve got Seneca this weekend, then a break until Middleburg. We’ll keep plugging away at the show jumping!