Showing at a Play Day

Our local ETI Corral had a Play Day last Saturday. Ranae and I were up early, spruced up the horses and trailered out to the same place we ride along the river. They have two very large arenas, so after registering I took Jessie into one and did some groundwork. She was more than distracted and we did some LFR II and backing and side-passing. I didn't want to get her too worked up because we were in a halter class right off the bat.

We got cleaned up for that and the class had at least 15 horses in it. We took fifth, not bad. The rest of the classes for the next hour were either bareback (she was too distracted for that) or English so we worked in the free arena. I thought a good exercise would be the stop-at-Whoa.. she wasn't really paying attention and she got turned into the rail quite a bit. Then she started getting pissy and she actually bucked some. I had put my spurs on because I thought it would help me get her attention. When she bucked I stuck her pretty good with both spurs by accident and she jumped again. It surprised us both. I worked on walking her around, and trotting, then did some serpentine exercises. I tried to lope her and she kept speeding up, so I would break her down and start again. She didn't much care for that and she gave another little buck.

It was pretty warm here, in the 80's, and I walked her around the arena quite a bit. Then we went over to the other horses by the gate to watch some of the English classes, and then I tied her to the trailer for about 30 minutes.

There was the Western Pleasure classes. We did the walk/trot and Ranae and Dusty got 3rd, and then she got a 2nd in the equitation, and she got one other that I'm not sure of. We pretty much just had fun going around the arena with the other horses. Jessie's trot was pretty fast. Her walk was probably too fast as well.

We did the ribbon pairs. I turned the wrong way and we were out. And, we did the Trot race, and got passed by a girl doing the prettiest extended trot.

It was about 2:30 and we were getting a bit worn out. Ranae had survived a Dusty kick up during her warm-up. It was pretty big. She managed to stay on thankfully. she was riding two-handed and it took forever for her to get a one-rein stop. I was about 50yds away and helpless. She thinks it was the lack of groundwork before leaving for the show. They hadn't done anything all week and both of them were pretty full of themselves.

Sunday's ride was to our usual neighborhood haunts. We did do a long trot and Jessie and I did some loping. They both seemed pretty tired from the show and were very compliant.

This morning I was up early and did about a 30 min GW session with Jessie. It was just getting light. She did pretty good. There are some barrels where we are forced to work now and I had her jumping those. She is getting much better at it.

Probably won't be much until the weekend and the weatherman is predicting rain....