hurry up and wait.

Today I took Dan in two jumper classes at the show. I went over this morning to find out where they were in the order of classes as i was trying to avoid having to be there all day. They told me my class was going to be coming up very soon as they only had 8 or 9 in the low schooling class before my class. I ran home and got Dan ready faster than ever and flew over there. Turns out there were a lot more than 8 or 9 rides in the low schooling and there was another low child/adult class before mine. So after rushing and even beginning to warm up, we had to sit and wait. It was a good long time before we ended up jumping.

The warm up areas at jumper shows are very difficult to navigate when you are there alone. It seems that people "claim" a jump for their warm up with a coach or groom. It is much different than an event where we are given a cross-rail, verticle, and oxer set at height and can only be jumped in one direction. Having no one there to help me today i would just sneak in when people were done and just deal with what ever was set up. It wasn't perfect, but got the job done.

The first class we did was only a .95 meter class so it was very small and i figured would be a good warm up. Dan went around really well jumping nicely without any spooking however, i was slightly over the time allowed. No jump off round but still finished 4th!

The next class was the high adult/child jumper and was suppose to be set at 1.10 meter but definitely looked more like 1 meter, so i was slightly disappointed. I wanted to get a feel for how Dan jumped over a solid 1.10 course as he has been schooling that great at home. Although small he jumped around even better than the first and I kept moving so we were in the time allowed. The jump off was good too, i tried to motor along but i was the first rider in the ring so did not get to see anyone else go before hand. I finished with a moderate time and at the end of a large class we took home a pink ribbon. A very good day over-all!

My goal was solely to jump clean and have Dan leave the rails up, and we accomplished that!

Tomorrow is hunter derby day. We jump late in the day as it is the 2nd to final class of the day. We will strive for rhythm and clean changes! Goal is to make it to the second round!