Current Equipment

One of the things I love about dressage is the simplicity of the gear required to do such complicated and intricate things. You don't need the most expensive set of everything in order to do it. Sure, you can buy $200 breeches and a $1000 pair of tall boots, but you don't *need* them. If you have a well fitting saddle, a well fitting bridle with appropriate bit, and a girth, that is really all you seriously need. 

When I was eventing I had basically one of everything in baby blue (or purple, before I got into the baby blues). Everything. Boots, bells, bit guards, reins, saddle pads, martingale and rein stops... even my spurs had baby blue stones set into them. If it came in baby blue, I had it. I had SO MUCH STUFF. And I have a lot of carriage driving stuff too. Carriage driving basically requires you to have an insane amount of everything... there is SO much gear. Regular plain old dressage is bringing me back to refreshing simplicity, and I'm enjoying it for a change.

Have saddle, have bridle, have boots, will ride. (And of course, helmet and gloves!)

I own surprisingly little gear. It surprises even me sometimes. I only own three really good pairs of breeches. (I have a number of others, but they either don't fit or they're aged and showing it... I should get rid of those). I have a few pairs of schooling gloves, which I think are important and worth spending money on. I have two helmets, a Charles Owen and an IRH - the IRH is the only one that is really dressage appropriate, but it is also aging and will need replacing before long. I only ride in tall boots (force of habit, I think), and am getting ready to invest in a nice new pair - I also always wear a set of spurs. As for shirts, I wear polos when I am at clinics, lessons, or schooling shows, but the rest of the time I just toss on whatever I feel like wearing, mostly tank tops or the occasional t-shirt. I don't have a million pairs of ridiculously expensive breeches or fancy fabric riding shirts, not by a long shot.

DSB boots and polos

Dylan's gear is also very simple. While I have about 50 million polos and boots, all that I use with regularity on him are either his DSB boots or leg liners with polos over them. He always wears bells, and I have lots of pulls ons in rotation as well as a pair of fleece lined ones. He has only one saddle pad, a Back on Track pad with a Thinline pad sewn right into it. It's the best pad I've ever owned, and still looks great, despite the fact that it both gets a ton of use and a ton of washing. Before I had the saddle fitted, he also had a Mattes correction pad, but since he no longer needs that I only ride him with just the saddle pad and nothing else. I've never had a saddle fit so well that I didn't feel like I needed some kind of something between it and my regular saddle pad, so this is new and exciting territory for me. He's going SO well with the newly fitted saddle that it makes me wonder how I ever got on otherwise! His saddle is obviously the Schleese, which is the one he came with that was custom fitted for him years ago. I alternate between the snaffle bridle and the double. I've been considering just showing in the snaffle bridle to start when we go out at 4th, which is completely acceptable. He goes just as well in either bridle, but since I tend to forget how to ride when I'm anxious, I don't want to get hung up on my curb unnecessarily in the show ring. 

Only the best pad ever

DSB boots and bells

Polos and leg liners

Double bridle (and O's lunging bridle next to it)

Picked this up for not very much money! Patent noseband and unnecessarily ridiculous browband

The old reliable... Schleese and girth!

There are things I am willing to spend money on, and things I am not. Things that really are important to a horse's comfort and ability, like well fitting saddles and well made bits, are things I don't compromise on, though I will always look for a good deal if possible. But all the frivolous stuff? Eh. I don't need it. I have more important things to spend money on, like good feed!

I pride myself on being a ridiculously good deal finder. I like nice equipment, but... why pay full price on it? I'll have another post on that later!

So, what do you use for your horses? Do you stick with the necessities, or do you go all out? 

NTW Sunrise Ridge HDT 4/11/15

What a weekend. What a perfect weekend! Everything just came together in the right way - the weather, the friends, the mare. The mare! The mare was the best this past weekend. I was so very impressed with her. In our first ever ADS sanctioned HDT, we placed second! 

Note: I highly apologize for the 9582820945869203495 photos in this post. Actually, no I don't. I am MORE than happy to spam the heck out of everyone with my pictures!

Oh yes I am the best worship me humans

I spent the week prepping - cleaning my cart, cleaning my harness, packing hay/grain/etc, organizing clothes, and trying painfully to memorize my courses. Friday arrived, and I had everything ready to go within short order. The showgrounds were about an hour away, quite easy to get to, so I had the mare there and put away in time to make it to the marathon course walk. By 'course walk,' I mean that they tossed us all into a tracter-drawn hay wagon and drove us around the course. Our course was 5k long, with five obstacles (formerly known as hazards but apparently the ADS decided that was too scary sounding recently and changed it). We weren't allowed to dismount and go walk the obstacles, so we had to come back and do that later on our own. We did get a feel for the terrain, which was a mix of wide open pasture land, hills, and wooded paths. The ground was excellent, the scenery was gorgeous, and the longhorns were thankfully pastures far, far away from us.

L and I went and walked the course again after the competitor's meeting. After they deposited us back at the show office, we were debriefed by the TD and the judge, and then sent on our way for the evening. I unloaded my cart and had my wheels measured (required for cones), fed O her dinner and tried to shuffle her hay around so that it would be in a spot where she'd bother to eat it, and headed out with L. O is a tricky horse to maintain at shows, because she doesn't just dive in and eat whatever you put in front of her. You have to figure out the spot she has decided to spend the most time in, and put her hay there - if the hay is on the 'wrong' side of her stall or pen, she won't eat it. She'll freely graze if there is grass, but the hay has to be in a certain spot or else it won't be touched. She'll generally finish her grainfoods if you give her several hours to do it, but sometimes you have to hand feed it to her. She lives on Ulcergard when we go away, and gets dosed with Pro CMC before she gets worked (and I always try to have her belly full of hay). Even at home gets carefully maintained for optimum gut health. I suppose she's not unlike me - whenever I go away from my home base, I don't eat hardly anything. I have to really make an effort to eat and drink enough, and even then I got plenty of raised eyebrows from my comrades at dinnertime as I listlessly shifted my food around on my plate. I guess the mare and I are a good match - got knows the second she got home, she voraciously stuffed her face with hay like she was starving, and I did the same.
Out on the course, we walked around until it was dusk, trying to go over the best routes for all of our hazards on the marathon. For Training, we are only required to go through gates A-B-C, and we are not timed. The time counts towards your total time of course, but it isn't penalty time. We had 23.05 minutes to get through the 5k course and all of the hazards. 

Back at the barn, we checked the horses one last time and crashed for the night. I slept well, but did get up on a whim at 3:30 to check O and her pony friend Bob. Both of them were eating hay (phew) and resting. Thank god for that!

The day dawned misty, cloudy, and grey. It originally called for 90% rain, but we lucked out and didn't get one drop. It stayed nice and cool and cloudy for the entire duration of the day - PERFECT weather for a horse show where you have to play dress up. I bathed O (much to her dismay, but she was filthy), and let her graze under a cooler to dry. I also lunged her for awhile to get the bucks out, but after a few minutes of the zooms, she settled down. Our dressage time was 10:40AM - we were ready to go by 9:45AM, and headed down to the safety check. There, officials check your harness and turnout, take a piece of paper that you have signed saying that everything in your turnout is in good working condition, and then they send you on your way to warm up. I really like that - I think it is super important to be safe, especially when you are in a rattling wooden box behind a prey animal.

Even though she was a little fidgety for the check, O warmed up like a total doll. She was SO good - soft and buttermouthed, compliant and quiet. I wondered if we could possibly hold it together all the way to the dressage ring!

Dressage warm-up:

Me: "Wtf am I wearing"

I think the outfit came out decently. Parts of it look sort of frumpy to me - and I think I need to invest in a wedge seat - but I think with some adjustments I could really make it into something nice.

The warmup went SO well.... but how would the test go? Only one way to find out...

Halt, salute, breathe!

I tried REALLY hard to narrow it down to my favorite pictures. But there were so many to choose from! And so many more I didn't post. They were ALL so good!

The test was a 56.39, which apparently is a pretty decent score. The best score of the entire weekend was a 47.67. I'm not completely clear on how this translates to eventing type scoring - in eventing it is quite common for everyone in top few placings to score in the upper 20's or low 30's. As far as I can tell, scoring in the 40's is about the same as scoring in the 30's in eventing. Or maybe that's not being generous enough... I can't really tell. Everyone gushed over O and raved about her score, so it must have been a decent one!

We were only one point behind the leader, a lady who has been showing Training level for literally 20 years. I'm not kidding, 20 years! Her mare is super, super experienced and mine is still quite green (and I am quite green too). Out of my test of solid 7s and 6.5s, there was one glaringly lonely 5 staring out at me from the final comments. Like in every other kind of dressage, you get scored (on a double coefficient for some of them) for the horse's gaits, impulsion, submission, and driver position, as well as on your presentation (your outfit, condition of vehicle/harness/horse, etc). We got a 9 on presentation! We also got a 7 for my position, a 7 for her impulsion, and a 7 for her gaits. I know you're all just shocked to hear that the lone 5 - which was a double coefficient, so technically two 5s - was for submission. Who, O? Never!

5 for submission? Can't imagine why!

Right from the dressage, we headed to the cones, which was running back-to-back. I really liked that format - that way, your horse was already warmed up and ready to roll. They remeasured the course for us, and we were on our way! I though for sure that she would spook at the judge's box, but she didn't. She also didn't spook at the giant Eiffel tower, the mules, or anything else going on.

The skinnies - the blue cones were set 5cm tighter than the regular cones! Made it!

Element A of number 17 - it was set on a very tight zig zag, and we had a knockdown on element D

Turning towards 6

The Eiffel Tower!

Trying not to knock over element C in the second of two very tight zig zag combinations

The course was super tough. 20 elements, two of which were combinations of four in a zig zag, and two skinnies. That's a LOT of stuff for a noob like me! In the end, I had 3 knockdowns. All of them were completely driver error, rookie mistakes from just not having done this enough. I knew every time I was about to hit one, but of course it is always too late by that time to save it! I was not the only one - literally every single person in my division had at least one knockdown. The leader of our division had two, I had three, and the person in 3rd place had one knockdown. Technically that made the 3rd place person the winner of the cones, but it did not change our overall placings.

Unhitching!

We unhitched O, put her back in her pen to rest and eat hay, and headed out to walk the marathon one more time. My awesome navigator B had showed up right before dressage, and I conned her got her to come with me out on the course walk. It ended up being a total laugh - we caught up with some others who let us bounce around in the back of their golf cart with them. The obstacles this years had the theme of "Into The Woods," presumably because they just made it into a movie recently. There was a Cinderella obstacle, a Little Red Riding Hood one, a Rapunzel one, a Jack and the Beanstalk one, one with the Big Bad Wolf in it, and another one with maypoles that had a theme that I can't remember. I got one look at the Cinderella carriage and thought O was probably going to have a heartattack and die when she saw it:

Spookerella

L and I actually thought the horses were going to be having total panic attacks over the entire course. We had Spookerella, Little Red Spooky Hood with her billow red cape, the Big Bad Spook which was a terrifying werewolf in a nightgown, and a bunch of other scary looking things on course. As we hitched and prepped for the marathon, I instructed my navigator B to HOLD ON in case of any massive spooks. W assured us that the horses weren't going to spook, but we didn't believe her.

After another safety check, we were off on course! We got to the first hazard, Spookerella, and waited for the spooks.... and.... they didn't come! B and I looked at each other briefly as we passed right by the carriage several times with no problem. She didn't even look at it.

That grin says "oh my god she didn't spook at anything!"

The longer we were on course, the bigger our grins got. O got her Hauling Ass trot on, and all I had to do was vaguely steer her. I didn't have to speed her up, slow her down, or redirect any massive spooks. All we had to do was follow our directional arrows, make it through all of our compulsory turning flags, and enjoy the scenery.

We did walk through sections of every hazard, which we can do at this level with no problems. I figured it was smarter to steer well and not smash into anything. She really impressed me in every hazard, powering up the little hills, carefully balancing with the breeching down them again, and steering on a dime (as best she could with the giant lumbering cart, anyway). B and I were laughing our way along as we cruised, just enjoying ourselves because we literally didn't have to do anything but sit there as we went along the kilometers between the hazards.

Super cool Rapunzel!

She's a good sweater, that's for sure! She worked hard!

We did come in over the time, because I walked in the hazards, but we weren't very far over it. We ended up with 9.75 time penalties. The leader had no time penalties, but remember she's been doing it for 20 years, so I felt like that was pretty good on my part! Both B and I were super impressed with O - she didn't spook at anything, trotted along easily, and then pulsed right down in the vetbox when we were done. She wasn't even winded! She did get good and lathered, but she always does - she is a profuse sweater. Which in the Texas heat is a good thing!

About to go wash off The Sweatball

We finished with a total score of 75.14, which landed us a solid second, miles ahead of the 3rd place person. Yeahhhh mare!

O has had the past few days off - a well deserved little vacation. She really earned it - what a mare!