A big jump up to Novice and a big fat 65% to go with it!
First of all, apologies for the distinct lack of entries for a few weeks, working 7 days a week is really taking its toll on me and life is super busy at the moment!
But I do have very exciting news, mainly that Denby and I qualified for the 2nd round of the Trailblazers Unaffiliated Dressage champs so this is my new goal in life - get in the top 6 at the 2nd round and then we will be on our way to the finals in July!
What you might be surprised to know is that we qualified for the Novice section! So long prelims, we managed all but 3 of you before we moved on up! It all happened rather by accident to be honest, I'd entered 2 prelim classes at my local venue (Swallowfield equestrian) however they had to run the classes very early in the morning due to numbers of entries which meant that because of my new job on weekend mornings I wouldnt be able to compete. So after sulking for a few minutes that I wouldnt be able to compete, I had a little nosey at the Novice test they were running in the afternoon and thought it didnt sound too bad. So the lovely organisers let me move class and refunded me for the 2nd class, and I was entered into the Novice class! Eeek!
I had no idea how it was going to go, we had no time to practice the test during the week as I had been learning the prelims, so after copius amounts of Youtube videos and furious revision at home the night before, we had to be ready. The naughty boy decided (in the pouring rain) that he didnt want to go on the lorry that day, so with only half an hour before the test we hacked the 1.4 miles instead. We were all soaked by the time we got there, and I had all of 5 minutes to do a bit of trot and canter, then we were called in!
It wasnt the greatest test we'd ever done, he wasnt all that relaxed, our centre line was very wobbly and he took a step back in the halt, but aside from that it wasnt bad! The judges gave us a great score of 65.18%, canter getting the best scores as always and the medium strides of trot and canter were well received too - my biggest fear was that he would just go faster but the judges said they could see a difference in length of stride (could have done more but there was a difference!) so I was very pleased with that. Our score of 65% easily qualified us for the 2nd round of Trailblazers, and in a class of 10 we came 6th with a lovely pink frilly.
So this brings us up to date, we have been training like mad for the 2nd rounds learning the test (Novice 27), getting him more supple, more relaxed and working on self-carriage as well. As a practice for the big day (that isn't until April 27th) we are going out this Saturday to do Novice 27 at Swallowfield, it is another 1st round qualifier so there's nothing to really achieve with this one, apart from seeing what my score is and getting the judges feedback so we can work on it between now and April 27th.
I promise this time there will be a report from the competition, and if I fail on that I will definitely post after the 2nd rounds. It is going to be tough to get through to the finals, top 6 in what will be a big class is going to be a big ask but I'll be pleased if we can simply keep improving on our scores, so we need to do better than 65% - nothing to worry about then!