Our student Tori Morgan had a great day today. Her horse has not run anywhere this year and this is the first year he has started the season at Preliminary. He did Preliminary and a One Star last year but he started the year at the Training level and worked his way up. This year he went down to Plantation and started the year Preliminary, he was more than up to the challenge.
Lying in fifth place going into cross country today, he did a very fast clear round, one of only two double clears in the division. With nothing to add to his Friday night total he moved up to third place to finish the day. His rail yesterday didn’t cost him any placings. The two horses that beat him were almost six points ahead of him after dressage and they stayed there. So it’s going to be dressage schooling for him before his next outing so that he is the one who is leading by six points next time out. Here is a little montage of the fences Selena was able to see on course.
Selena coached Tori and then she has three of her own to ride. Foxwood High of course, Rather Boldly (Riley) and Derg Boru (King Brian). Woody is on his lead up to Rolex and today was a dressage day. With the noise of the loudspeakers and all the other razzmatazz of Plantation Horse Trials just the other side of the road, it was a good day to work on ‘focus’ in the ring.
King Brian went out for a nice long hack to enjoy the rolling terrain around Unionville, PA. When you look at this photo of the lovely rolling hills ahead, it is no wonder that the area is choc a bloc with eventers. Phillip Dutton, Boyd Martin, Jane Sleeper and a great many more top class event riders are all based in this beautiful part of America which lends itself so well to the sport. Riley had today off as he is shipping home with Bentley and that is enough for any horse to do.
Seen through the ears of Derg Boru
The riders at Balsam Hall made light work of our progressive grid. The exercise was to imagine you have a piece of two by four between your belly button and the base of the horses neck, just where the breast plate goes across in front of the withers. It was hard work to keep the imaginary 2×4 in place. If you rock in the canter it falls, if you lean to the side if falls, if you duck too much over the jump it falls, if you don’t duck enough it falls. It is a very powerful upper body control exercise and extremely difficult to do until you get the hang of it. At the end everybody seemed to have done a nice job of schooling their horses and they all looked very competent indeed.
