The 2020 season went out with a bit of a whimper for us, but I guess that’s just the theme of 2020 isn’t it?

Oh So came sound after about 10 days, but I took him to the vet anyways just to have him checked out, and he was perfectly sound with no pain upon palpation anywhere and nothing that came up on flexions or the lameness locator.

We had lost a bit of fitness, so we chose to do a CT at Loch Moy, which went well. I picked a bit to the third fence in show jumping, but then got my act together!

We had a nice cross-country schooling the following week and I entered Morven Park. Unfortunately that meant foregoing a trip to Tryon for the big CCI4*-L, which ended up being the biggest event in the U.S. this year, but I decided I wanted to compete once more before the end of the year.

When we walked the cross-country on Saturday, Lisa and I were taken aback by how big the course was. There was a huge drop to a cabin about six strides away, and at that point, we started to think it wouldn’t be a good idea to run.

I emailed with the course designer and tried to communicate with the TD because I felt that a bank shared with prelim was inappropriate for the level, but I was told it’s been used on the course in the past. I consulted the rules which said a novice bank can be 2’9″ and a drop can be 3’11”! I guess they were considering this fence a drop. I have never seen a drop that huge novice anywhere. We know Oh So will go down any bank, but he hasn’t seen one that big since his prelim days, and we know if he launched off it we’d be worrying about his legs. Considering the footing was also iffy, we withdrew.

It ended up causing a lot of issues, unsurprisingly, but Lisa and I were OK with our decision, as much as it sucked to pay that much money for a CT and not be able to have a final cross-country run this year. I’ve since filled out an event evaluation.

So now we’re into winter and will hopefully be able to get up to Loch Moy to school the arena courses.

It’s been a frustratingly short season, mostly due to COVID, but I’m glad we were able to get out as much as we did and even win a couple of events.