Turning The Second Barrel: An Equestrian Journal

ASCHS (Thursday, Friday, & Saturday)

Oh golly, where do I begin? So much has happened in the past three days. So many interesting things. Or they were at least interesting to me. I guess we'll go in order of events.

Thursday/Friday:
So Thursday morning we got a call from a friend that told us that they had a horse with western pleasure training under one of the big names in our area, however, she'd never shown him in WP or the like so he was rusty. Well, we choose between a rusty WP horse and ol trusty speed horse,  I chose rusty WP horse. We took him out to the show and rode him the evening before our 8 am class as they had a practice in the main arena. We worked for a couple of hours that evening and then we were off to go. All things considered, he did great! We didn't place in either HUS or Queens but we didn't stick out too bad. Or at least gait-wise, because he wasn't mine I didn't couldn't cut his mane to band it and didn't have a fake tail for him. But in HUS his gaits were the correct speeds he was moving pretty, his head was in a good position, he was rusty and I messed us up. I'm bad about hearing them and thinking they said something they didn't. I could have sworn they said lope (even though HUS is canter, they've miscalled it before), and they said walk, so we loped a couple of strides. So that hurt us. Then in Queens, we didn't do bad, just not great. We were slow but not slow enough, his head was too high, and he kept swishing his tail, so he didn't make the cut. We weren't last place but we weren't in the top 10. We were in the bottom four of sixteen. However, all in all, I had been on him for the first time less than twenty-four hours before I showed him, so it went great in my book. In the words of a friend, it wasn't bad for a catch ride.

Saturday:
So today we just had barrel pick-up and I really don't have too, too much to say but it was a good run. We were 17th out 48 with a 13.265-second run. It was a good run in general and good practice for show of Champions. I'm probably going to cut this chapter a little short and end now by saying that even though I'm not showing tomorrow I'll be going there to watch Spunky show as one of our friend's kid who's riding lead-in has a horse that has been acting up all day and they didn't feel comfortable letting a three or four-year-old on and asked to borrow Spunky.