In one of our best ‘Welcome to Eventing’ stories to date, reader Amanda tells the story of getting her OTTB, Gump, for free, and a few months later competing in their first event, (as in first event ever for both rider and horse.) Thanks for sharing your cool story, Amanda, and as always, thank you for reading.
I “bought” Gump a.k.a. Jewel of the Cat in January 2011. Actually I picked him up for free. His seller due to lots of life circumstances could no longer keep him and admitted that his bad behaviors had made riding less than enjoyable. The first month I owned him he bolted, he bucked, and boy could he spook! He spooked at leaves, he spooked at cats, he spooked at dogs, he spooked at my husband (but who wouldn’t..the man was riding that horrific horse-eating beast known as a bicycle), and I won’t even mention the toddler daughter cruising in
her toy car incident. I learned to lower my stirrups and hang on! Never have my thighs been so toned.
Slowly but surely Gump learned to trust me and I learned to trust him, so we packed our trailer and headed out to our first schooling trial in July to compete at the Beginner Novice level. Did I mention this was my first horse trial too?
Our dressage round started out shaky, the letter ‘A’ it turns out is quite terrifying to Gump, but we finished solid middle of the pack with a score of 38.1 The stadium round went extremely well. Gump jumped like he’d been doing it his whole life. Now only one thing
stood between us and a clean “middle of the pack” victory!
…the cross country round.
My first mistake was trying to walk the course in my NEW riding boots. They were biting in to my ankles something fierce after about 100 yards. My second mistake was not taking my husband as I am very geographically challenged…meaning I can NOT read a map. I got lost!
So at some point…after 30 minutes of silent cursing…I just turned around and walked back the way I came. Which means not only would my horse be doing his first cross country course, not only would I be doing my first cross country course, but we would be doing it blind! How hard can it be? You just follow the numbers in sequence…right?
We get in the starting box and we’re off! …at a blazing trot! Hey, we broke in to a canter after the first jump, give us a break.
Everything was going smoothly until we reached Jump 5…the water! It came to me in that moment that I’d never taken this horse through a puddle, much less a whole pond! We were in a record drought. He hadn’t even seen rain since I’d owned him! With a little clucking and
smooching we were finally able to creep across the water and exit at a trot. Here we go!!
Somewhere between jump 7 and 8 it all fell apart. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. We were just having fun! We galloped up a hill. We galloped down a hill. And we hit a massive clump of trees. Wait, this can’t be right? We trotted back up the hill and back down
the hill. I see a blur of a grey horse go by. I know that horse? It was the number behind me! Follow her!
We trot cautiously around a bit until we finally see (drum roll) Jump #8! Yeah! Here we go!
Holy COW! Jumps 9 and 10 were huge! The song from that Disney movie, Finding Nemo, came to mind. “Just keep galloping…just keep galloping!” We clear them!
At this point adrenaline has completely taken over and we are cruising! Jumps 11, 12, 13, 14, 15…I see the finish line! And we cross! Wahoooo!
I don’t think you could wipe the grin off of my face with an atomic bomb.
We finished with a score of 58.1 after our little mishap at the water and I couldn’t have been prouder of my little Gump.
At our most recent event we lowered that score to 42.1. We can’t wait for our next outing February 5th!
