Steph Rhodes-Bosh, a Canadian short lister and 5th place Rolex ’10 finisher, checks in with her latest blog entry after competing at Waredeca last weekend. Click here or in the “categories” portion of the sidebar to read Steph’s previous two entries. Thanks for writing this Steph and thank you for reading.
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Hey Eventing Nation, hopefully those of you in the Virginia/Maryland area have been enjoying all this rain! I caught myself about to complain about the weather this morning, and then remembered how great 85 and rainy feels when compared to 105… I’ll take it!! The recent weather provided the ground at the Waredaca HT with some much needed rain late in the week, and those of us competing there on the weekend surely appreciated it. This was my first competition back with Ollie since Rolex, and I set out on the 2 hour drive from The Plains to Gaithersburg, MD intending to have a accurate dressage, forward flowing showjump, and a quiet and steady canter around the cross country to get us tuned up and ready for the fall season.
The dressage was on grass, which is fine, but the wet conditions kind of made for boggy wet ground on the track and in the corners of the arena. I was a little worried about how that would feel for Ollie, and was concerned that he would get tight and short strided trying to make his way across the muck. Thankfully, he seemed to agree with my choice of studs, and moved really well in the ring!! I think that next time I’m in that situation, I will be prepared to ride a little more aggressively in the ring and not worry about the footing, because I gave away a few points just by being a little tentative. Even with my conservative moments, we ended up with a 30.8, which makes me very happy!!
After the dressage, I went out to walk the Intermediate xc and showjumping and by fence 4 on my xc course walk I was just itching to get at it (Fence 4ab was a Rolltop/Table to a left handed corner, and narrow/angled obstacles are Ollie’s forte…) I could just see it in my head how he was going to jump in big over the rolltop, right side on a bit of a left to right, and straight in 4 strides over the corner… I couldn’t believe I had to wait 3 hours to jump! But, wait we did… Ollie chilled out on the trailer, I had smoothie from the Smoothie Lady (you guys who have never encountered the Smoothie Lady are missing out) and just generally killed time until it was time to tack up for the jumping.
I had one rail in the showjumping, which is hopefully just blowing the cobwebs out, but he was jumping like his usual fantastic self! Running Ollie cross country is absolutely the best thing in the world, so I obviously wasted no time making my way from the showjumping over to the xc warmup area. I was really curious to see what his head was like in warmup, because he hasn’t run since his first 4 star and I wouldn’t have been suprised at all if he had been a complete monkey in anticipation of running and jumping. He was actually pretty quiet to the warmup fences, but kind of taking the bit on landing and chewing off a little.. so after a quick bit adjustment courtesy of Jen Holling, he was a lot more rideable on the landing side. I shouldn’t have been concerned, though. Once we got to the startbox, he got his head up and stared really hard out at the course, but there were no theatrics whatsoever. There was a group of ladies at the startbox who were all laughing at the expression on his face. It was a bit the same look that he gets when he knows he’s about to get his dinner. After standing like a statue for the countdown, off we went!! He was very quiet and professional the whole way around, doing all the right things and jumping very well!! Every single fence was just casual and efficient and on to the next…. which was exactly what I was hoping for. I think we picked up about 14 time penalties thanks to our quiet cantering between the fences. All in all, it was another great day of eventing, thanks to the rain, all the hard working crew at Waredaca, and a fabulous pony. I’m really looking forward to the trip up to Richland Park for the Advanced HT at the end of the month. Until then….. 🙂
