Today I am very pleased to welcome back Canadian WEG rider Stephanie Rhodes Bosch as the first of Eventing Nation’s spring guest bloggers. When we asked Steph to first start writing for us in early 2010, she was a relative unknown to most of Eventing Nation. With a considerable amount of hard work, a healthy dose of EN Karma, and a fabulous horse, Steph charged onto the North American eventing scene in 2010, finishing 4th at Rolex and 6th individually at the World Equestrian Games to go with her team silver medal. Don’t tell Steph this, but with two top-10 placings at four-stars, she and the Port Authority aka “Ollie” were probably the best performing eventing pair in North America during 2010. We are very fortunate to be able to join Steph’s journey once again this year. It is my guess that very soon Steph’s blog posts will start being filed under “Road to Badminton.” For more information on Steph, visit her website. Thanks for writing this Steph and thank you for reading.
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From Steph:
Hey Eventing Nation, and welcome to another inside look at how we do things at Camp Canada. We are fortunate enough to have another year training out of Ms. Mars’ beautiful Meredyth South here in Ocala, and there are even more Canuck’s joining in on the fun for 2011. Thursday was our final day of the first training sessions, and these last four days have given us all renewed excitement for the things to come, as well as some serious homework (some of us more than others…) towards our competitive goals.
One particularly exciting thing about 2011 is the upcoming trip to Badminton for several Canadian pairs. We are all looking forward to participating in one of the most prestigious and historical competitions in the world of Eventing, and everyone involved in the program is proud of the progress that is made obvious simply by our presence at an event of this caliber! Although, it’s not only our presence at these big international competitions that we are hoping to be remembered for. We are all intent on being competitive at whichever of the spring three days we compete at.
As John mentioned recently, Team Canada is excited to welcome Gunnar Ostergaard to our program for some extra help and fine tuning of the dressage. He came to the farm to teach on Monday and Wednesday afternoons to add that extra level to our dressage days. Gunnar provides a great attitude towards the process and a wealth of knowledge that is definitely appreciated by all of us.
Tuesday and Thursday were both jumping days, although the two days each had a separate focus and completely different exercises. Tuesday was very gymnastic oriented for a lot of us, using bounce rails in our canter work, gradually building up to a vertical with poles on approach and landing to help with that ever-so-important footwork that coach is always talking about!! I know that’s a good one for a lot of the horses at this time of year, because they are a little rusty on the flatwork and more than just a little keen on getting back to the fun stuff… running and jumping! After we had played in the poles for a while, we moved on to the next step, which was keeping that communication and discipline over single fences and combinations. We had a set of jumps in a circle, and jumping in, doing a tight circle, and jumping out proved to be a real challenge the first couple of times! Ollie in particular gets very excited and makes a move at fences on approach, and then has a tendency to want to tank off on landing, so a quiet canter up to larger fences and expecting a challenging circle on landing is a sure way to remind him he needs to listen!
Thursday was probably a little more what the horses had in mind… cross country! (Except for poor Ollie. We opted for another flat lesson, just to make sure all our body parts stayed where they needed to stay…) The exercises were geared towards helping get us back in cross country mode, where you are comfortable jumping out of a more open step, but can go from galloping to coffin canter exactly when you need to. Gotta be efficient!! Then there was some playing in the water jump, and some narrow and angled exercises to make sure everyone was on the right track. All in all, a good way to wrap up 4 days of training.
So, for all of you that can’t be in Ocala to audit the training sessions, hopefully you feel like you got a glimpse of what goes on! Thanks for reading…
~Stephanie
