AAHJA Show and HJ Fox Show Recap

Life has been crazy busy with college and the beginning horse show season, so I’m a little late to the game with blogging about our first two shows of the season! By a little late, I mean almost a month late – oops! 😬

There isn’t a whole bunch to say about either show in particular, so I thought it would be fun to just condense the two into one post. After all, I think it’ll keep everything a little more manageable. We’ll see how this goes haha!

Idlewild Farms | AAHJA Show Series

We were super lucky for this show because Georgia decided to grace us with a beautiful, dry weekend after weeks of constant rain! We decided to take full advantage of the lack of rain and decided to kick off the show season by entering Diesel into a small schooling show 15 minutes from the farm.

Expectations for this show were set very low. My trainer decided to enter me and Dies into the 18″ or 2 ft division just to assess where we were at confidence-wise. However, being able to get on and w/t around without incidence would have been a win in my book. This was for a few reasons: 1) this was Diesel’s first time off property since October, 2) his under saddle time has been very limited due to Georgia’s recent decision to adopt a monsoon season, and 3) this was his first time at this particular farm.

Since it was just a one day show, we decided to trailer in that morning and just stay the day. This was all fine and dandy until Dies decided being tied to the trailer was for the birds and promptly untied himself in order to take a quick walk-about around the farm. Sigh.

Other than that, the day went pretty smoothly. Dies ended up being pretty darn great for our o/f courses and gave me the confidence boost that I needed in order to start preparing to move up to the 2 ft in the next couple of shows. We had a few moments where I had to remind him that we needed to go turtle speed for the adds, but overall, he was a very good boy. The flat, on the other hand, was not our best performance. It wasn’t terrible, but Dies was definitely not on his A-game. For some reason, he was convinced that the standards standing beside the arena fence that had been there the entire day suddenly wanted to eat him, and once he got his mind on that, it was history.

 

Despite our adventurous flat class, Dies and I managed to pull our first champion together! Granted, it was a small class though. 😂

March Classics | HJ Fox Show Series

This show was Dies’s first official show of the season. I call this show the first official show because it consisted of him being stalled away from home for the weekend. Of course, if you knew Diesel in real life, you would know that he considers this a very big deal on Fridays. Saturday and Sunday? No big deal. But Fridays? Yeesh, we’re a screaming, spooking ball of anxiety.

Fridays are always a bit of a circus for us with all of the commotion created by the trailers coming in and out, but this one, in particular, was quite a doozie. He just would not settle down. I keep telling myself that this too shall pass, but I can’t help but think, will it? It certainly doesn’t seem like it. I mean, the guy has a whole year of being exposed to the Friday schooling craziness and showing at this venue under his belt, but for some reason, he still just cannot handle Fridays. Maybe we’ll get there… someday.

 

At least he’s cute though! 

 

He redeemed himself on Saturday and Sunday by being a perfect muffin for his first ever 2’6 classes! There is a lot we need to continue to work on (i.e softness to the fences and raising his confidence over bigger fences), but for his first show at this height, he did wonderfully. He had nice, solid changes and was pretty adjustable throughout each course, so I consider that a success. Not to mention, he even managed to snag 3rd place in his first ever hunter handy course out of a large class!

I think the highlight of this show was when he stepped out of the 2’6 ring with my trainer and went straight into carting me around the mini hunters! Being able to make the transition from 12 ft strides and changes to doing the adds was a huge milestone for him as it shows just how much more mature he has become over the winter. I couldn’t be more proud of him!

 

Overall, it was a great first show of the season for Dies! Like always, there is still so much that we need to work on in order to get him performing his very best, but boy, he has really come a long way since the beginning of last season!

Dies seems pretty proud of himself too!