What's red on right...

...white on left, and grey in the middle*?

How about a Dopie Horse!

(*Being in the middle does not necessarily mean being straight through the middle.)

yes, i am also suspicious of this being a good idea.

After changing the end of my show season around about ten different times trying to fit in somewhere I could get volunteer hours (By the way, emailed the secretary and manager for the show again and still haven't heard anything. However, as long as I get to keep them this time, I'm signed up to volunteer Saturday at the Courtney King-Dye clinic instead. Fingers crossed!), and test the waters at First, and not have to drive all over the countryside, I started taking notice of all the little year-end intro horse trials popping up.

However, most of the ones I was seeing were Intro B for the dressage test, crossrails or barely 2' for the stadium, and nothing more exciting than step over logs for cross country. Opie is no tried and true jump jump horse yet--in fact, he's maybe one step up from glowing neon green--but there was no way I was doing a w/t test and crossrails. Mostly for my own sanity, and because I really couldn't justify shelling out the money to do something I could do at a hunter pace at my home barn for zero dollars.

after doing the jumpies in a field without having to travel

Right as I wrote off doing an event as a fun way to wrap up the season, the local-ish eventing group posted that the weekend after their final recognized show they'd be doing a schooling Intro HT. I have a lot of feelings about eventing up here, but I knew that this show would be set up professionally with real dressage, stadium, and cross country jumps that were just miniature versions of BN.

I waited to enter until I walked the cross country course with my barn mate doing her first BN last weekend. The area had gotten absolutely dumped on after a summer of drought conditions, and this place is the very best at cancelling because of flooding. The ground, however, was in great shape despite the weather and with a pretty mild forecast for this week I signed up feeling confident, for once, that my eventing plans wouldn't get shit on again.

I refused to think about jumping or a new test or anything else until I got the show at the fair over and done with because fuck knows I didn't need anything else to blow my crazy brain apart. Opie got Monday off, and then I set about making an event horse in one week!

i'll be honest, it mostly involved feeding an entire bag of
peppermints in the space of two days. that is not a lie.

I free jumped him through a line of bounces Tuesday because I want him to start to become cognizant of what his feet are doing. He was good through that once I kicked them all up to 2'3". He was pretty lazy before that, although he was his typical #childgenius self and immediately remembered the free jumping game: take yourself through the chute and get cookies. Easiest cookie dispensing ever.

Yesterday I set up a bending line and a single vertical with placing poles on either side to mimic the previous day's free jumping. He absolutely wrecking balled that shit the first time through, but then thought maybe he could check in with me. I got him on the right pace and he coasted through perfectly. Lots of that type of work is in his jumping future. The bending line went well enough for it being his first ever one. A little scrambled and wiggly, but he never tried to say No.

Today there was a little course set up with another bending line in a different spot, a vertical on the diagonal, and a one stride. I dropped the one stride down to half Xs and then made the other jumps between 2' an 2'3". The stadium is supposed to be around 2' which is firmly in our comfort zone right now.

so cute and curly

The one stride was a complete joke of part levitating, part somersaulting so I wrote it off completely. We'll cross that bridge later.

Opie has a great big canter with a great big reach. I'm trying not to shut that down and create a Bobby pony canter, but I can let that get away with me a little bit. Sometimes he needs to be packaged up into a smaller canter. The very first jump I let him go free wheeling around a corner to a short approach and he left about a thousand feet away. I picked him back up, sat down, held and waited, and the second time was golden. Derp.

The whole jump school was a bit like that. Trying to balance forward without becoming strung out. Bless his little Dopie heart, he doesn't have a dishonest bone in his body and was gung-ho to take off from absolutely anywhere I got him and didn't hold a grudge when it was a bit of a scramble.

We finished stringing together a quick course with lots of turning and steering which was super for where he's at. Then I headed outside to the back field quickly to pop over the stadium jump bending line to the straw which was easy peasy.

These past two days were the first times ever I haven't trotted him to a single jump. I'm proud of that because it means all the bitch work and daily grinding of getting that canter under control has payed off. He felt balanced and adjustable, and while we dove head first into the ground on landing a couple times, it wasn't until the end when he was getting a little tired and I was getting a little lax. I think next year he's going to come out so much stronger and absolutely struttin'.

this thing is nice and wide for how short it is.

So we got two jump schools in, tomorrow I'll learn BN B, and then Saturday I'll be at a clinic (hopefully!) volunteering all day before showing Sunday. How much more prepared do we need to be?

Ha ha ha. We're gonna die.