Well, as usual, my blog is not as timely as I would have liked. I had all the best intentions however Peyton's good snoozing at the hotel turned out that she was just storing up her energy so she could vanish right before the first horse inspection and not return until late on Thursday, which as you might guess led me to have to make lots of phone calls and visits to local homeowners, police and animal control! I want to thank Lynne Mathews at Jersey especially as she helped so much to try and locate Peyton...
You might wonder where we found her as an aside...Neal drove up from home to help me look on Thursday afternoon, knowing I was very unhappy and by the time he let Jenny, our other dog, out of the car Peyton was looking at him like "Hi Dad, what are you doing here...." To say we were all relieved is an understatement and she was under house arrest from that point forward.
Onto the event...I went to Jersey with the thought I was going to try my best, stay present in my decisions and reactions, and to try and have fun. I tend to be serious and very hard on myself, and I got to thinking about how amazing the horses in my life are and have been, and that in the moment, sometimes it is easy to forget how much we appreciate, enjoy and love them and the people in our lives. I know that might sound a little corny or strange, but I thought about how sometimes you will hear someone say after a horse gets hurt how every jump is a gift, and I thought well, every jump and every time we try with them it is a gift....so that is how I started to think about it.
I was really happy with Tag all weekend. For the dressage we had the opportunity to work with Kim Severson again which we had done in Aiken. She was a big help and very supportive and lead us to an energetic and positive performance in the dressage that had a big smile on my face as we left the dressage ring!
Saturday was cross country and we were second out of the box and he jumped fantastically all the way around except at the last where I just did not see a thing and just held it together and got it done. I was a bit disappointed to have the time faults I did, but I made the conscious decision at the 4 minute mark when he started being a little dull to my half halt to make sure that I had him on his feet and that he and I were smart on the presentation we made to our fences.
He came out of cross country no worse for wear although he had pulled his shoe and jogged up like a champ on Sunday morning and so it was off to show jumping.
Jim Wofford helped me course walk and warm up, and Tag was jumping like a million bucks, unfortunately we were unable to get back on our haunches enough to get the last vertical in the last combination done cleanly and had that rail. We ended up in 11th and while I wish somethings had been different. He was excellent, and improved on his last two CCI** results.
Also we were tapped by the USET to jog in front of the vet panel for the Pan American Selection Trials. That was an exciting opportunity and we will see where we go from here...Neal has the videos up on the website, and I also want to give a big shout to Page and Gillian Cowley who were huge supporters of mine on Saturday and Sunday.
Talk to you soon,
Courtney
