Thoroughbred Makeover: Competition Day
As I was in the hotel getting ready, I looked out the window and noticed it was drizzling. The forecast for that day called for on and off rain and I was a little worried. It’s not that Arrow doesn’t like water it is just that he likes it a certain temperature. The last time it rained at home, my mom and I went to let the horses in the barn, and Arrow was acting funny. He backed up into the barn with his head tucked underneath himself and his body was as close as he could get to the ground. That wasn’t the only time he has had an issue. I took him to an indoor arena that was about ten minutes away and of course it had decided to rain right when we got there. I unloaded Arrow and his back was as close as it could get to the ground and he looked like he thought he was being shot and slowly succumbing to his injuries. Since I had never ridden him in the rain and had seen how he acts, I messaged Erin Strader, his rider at Maker’s Mark before I adopted him. She said she had never ridden him in the rain, but based on his overall work ethic and willingness, we should be absolutely fine! The rain had stopped when I got to the horse park, so I never got to find out. My ride time came up quickly and I headed to the warm up ring.
The warm up was very muddy and ruined all the hard work of cleaning Arrow and his tack. We literally spent hours the day before getting his markings white, his body shiny, and his tail perfect, but everybody else was in the same boat. Arrow was great in his warm up and I had a lot of time to walk and stretch. My number was called and it was time to leave the practice area and to start the test. I went around the arena a couple of times before they blew the whistle to make sure he wasn’t going to spook at something, even though he had already seen a hundred times. He was a little tense when I first started the test but loosened throughout. He tried his hardest to stay focused the whole time and was successful. I still was trying to figure out his canter, so we didn’t do very well turning at the canter, but I was happy that he didn’t try to jump out of the ring. Our turn up center line and halt were better than they had been and our geometry was fairly accurate. The freestyle started immediately after the halt at the end of the first test. The judge at B blew her whistle and we had two minutes to do whatever we wanted. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the freestyle because he didn’t know very much and he was so young, so I kind of just made it up as I went. I didn’t canter because it wasn’t his strongest gait, so I just continued at the trot. We did some movements out of dressage test I had ridden in the past and attempted a couple of tear drops and changes of direction from B to E and E to B. Arrow put up with the weird movements very well and we were finished. Next was the material class. We had a little bit of a break between my dressage ride and the material class so I kept his tack on loosely and let him graze. I walked over to the indoor warm up area while off his back because I didn’t want to repeat the banner “incident” and I didn’t have to get on him quite yet. Inside the warm-up section there was plenty of “spooky” stuff because they were getting the freestyle props ready. There was an elaborate castle tower for a horse to run up in and another prop consisted of a bunch of tarps for a horse to go under and in between. Of course those things didn’t spook him, yet the banner a couple days ago did! I put his bridle back on, tightened my girth, got back on him, and started walking around. It was a pretty tight space because a lot of horses showed up, and not all were well behaved. Almost all of the horses were acting a little crazy because they didn’t like the props, so Arrow and I were trying to avoid the other horses. Finally, they called us into the large indoor, five horses at a time. I was with one other junior and other adults. Nobody really understood what to do so we were just walking around until we heard otherwise. The announcer then instructed us all to trot. After, it went to the canter, walk, change of direction, etc. I felt pretty good about our performance because most of the horses were having some crazy moments, and Arrow was such a good boy and did everything I asked without a fuss. After it was over, my mom, grandma, and I went to watch some of the freestyles. They were amazing! We saw people jump through fire, drive under the “tarp tunnel”, bareback and bridleless routines, and more! We also tried to watch the other people who were a part of the Maker’s Mark Dream Team (Rosie Napravnik – a former jockey, Dorothy Crowell – an international four star eventer, Anne Barry Weber – a Grand Prix show jumper, and Ed Crothers – a horse whisperer) to support them. It was a very fun day.