This is part 15 of Jenny’s adventure as a working student and EN guest blogger. Jenny has ambitiously decided to spend the next year as a working student in Lexington, Kentucky. In this post, Jenny’s writes about returning home from Aiken. Thanks for writing this Jenny and thank you for reading.
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Hello Eventing Nation!
Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time–those of you who follow college basketball should understand why a UConn graduate needs to be lying low in Lexington right now! Living in the horse capital is great in every aspect, except when UConn beats UK, and then goes on to win the national title… people forget after a while though, right? Good thing I live on a farm and rarely go out
Last weekend was Spring Bay HT, and Molson and I got to do our first novice! I was really excited after a successful CT two weeks ago that it would carry over to this weekend, and the dressage sure did. Moo warmed up a little bit tense, probably due to the fact that a monsoon hit the horse park minutes before our ride time so the rings were sloppy, and very crowded because rides were delayed due to the storm. He put in a good test that I was happy with, and we were tied for 2nd with a 33. Then came stadium, which I was quite familiar with since we volunteered to help set up the course for the show last week. I was thrilled to see they were using the colorful toy boxes, because I have seen them in the Training and Prelim courses and have wanted to jump them for quite some time now. However, Moo was not nearly as excited as I was, and we ended up having a stop at the toy boxes, and some time penalties, sadly moving us far out of our 2nd place. I was really disappointed that I didn’t ride the fence well enough and had let my guard down–I can promise you that won’t happen again. Cross-country was on Sunday, and I woke up determined to not make any more silly mistakes. The course was fairly straightforward, with lots of hills and inviting jumps. When I walked the course on Friday I felt extremely confident for Molson, however after our stop on Saturday I was a little nervous. Megan was really supportive and encouraging in warm up, as Molson was being really good, and she saw me off to the start box telling me to ride every fence, don’t take anything for granted, and keep the determination. If I had to pick one thing going trough my mind at that moment, it was that I would not make the same mistake twice, and would most definitely ride every single step of the course. Luckily, I managed to keep the determination all five minutes of the course, and we came in double clear. I was happy with our run, Moo started off a bit rusty and wiggled to a couple of the fences, but was willing to trust me and jump them anyway. He was extremely forward so I had to take some big tugs near the end of the course so that we didn’t get any speed faults… oops! In the end, we finished 8th, which I was very happy with because I learned so much from this weekend and hope that I learn to not let my guard down, even when Molson seems to be perfect in warm up!
Today was a rainy day, so we did lots of paperwork and sent in entries for Greater Dayton and May Daze. I entered Moo in both of them at Novice, and if all goes to plan we will move up to Training in June. Megan helped me schedule 5 Trainings before my year-end goal of doing the Training 3-Day at Team Challenge in October…eek!
GO HUSKIES!
xo, Jenny
