Pine Hill HDT 5/28-5/29/16 - Marathon

Phew - I am finally caught up with Pine Hill! Of course, now I am leaving today to go to the Cowboy Country HDT.... so I'll have another huge writeup at the end of that! Doing back to back shows is super hard - it's exhausting to prep for and go to a show, and then to literally come back and prep for ANOTHER show the next weekend? Phew! My showclothes are loaded, my harness and carriage are scrubbed and ready, O's boots are washed, my grooming stuff is all loaded, my trailer is cleaned, the hay and feed are all packed, and I think everything is just about ready to go... oh wait, I still have to pack my going away bag. Damnit!

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Stop me if you've heard this joke... a mini, a mule, and a mare walk into a bar...

How many other sports can you have all of these types of equines interacting with one another, and not care one bit? The sight of a mini - or the sight of a mule - sends a lot of horses into a total tailspin. Not a driving horse though! The little mule is Handsome, who is known well around these parts, and O fell in LOVE with him. I'm not sure if she liked him because of her own mules here at home, or if he just was the right size to make her think he was her baby, but she couldn't stop nickering to him, and then cried hysterically for him when she went back to her stall. She doesn't feel that way about the other minis, just the mini mule apparently!

Sunday morning dawned bright and early again, and once again we had our ritual of terribly bad coffee, donuts, and filling the cooler with things to drink. I decided after feeding O and cleaning her stall that I really needed to go walk obstacles 4 and 5 again, since I was not clear on the route and couldn't remember some details. Thank god I did - I was completely confused and lost. Some experienced people came along at one point to find me standing in one spot looking totally lost, and they were kind enough to point me in the right direction.

Oooo aaaaah

I finally got things sorted out in my head, and walked back to the barn. My feet were sloshing in my shoes already - it was still SO wet. There was active water running across the course still! Everything looked like this:

Ehhhhhhhhhhh

If you are super interested in actually seeing the coursemaps, you can find them all here. But they are kind of image heavy, so I won't post individual pictures of them, save for part of Hazard 4:

I also did a few Facebook livestream videos over the weekend, one of which I'm going to share because it's both educational and kind of funny. You'll hear me make some random commentary, which is directed at the people who were interacting with me and making comments on the livestream. It's a super fun tool for things like this! I'll probably do a few more at Cowboy Country too. 

As we were one of the last to go, I knew the course was going to get increasingly torn up as the day went on. The VSE drivers all came back to the barn with their minis looking fresh, and with reports of it not being too bad, but I figured it would change. I didn't even bother to really seriously wash my carriage... because why do it. It was just going to get covered in muck anyway! It was so mucky that I decided to go completely barefoot for O - usually she shows in boots, but it was so muddy that I felt they would just get ripped off anyway. 

Fat girl standing around sweating in her stall from the humidity 

We warmed up at a walk... got ready... and off we went!!

Right from the get-go, everything was slop. TOTAL slop. It felt like we didn't even have wheels on the carriage - like she was just dragging a dead weight through the mud. There wasn't a single spot on the course where I felt like it let up for a little while. It makes it so much more exhausting for the horse when they have to drag the carriage like that instead of it rolling along smoothly. She was exceptionally clever about her footing, and slowed in a few spots of her own accord - I let her choose these, and then trotted onward once we were through the areas. The entire course had been slowed down a whole kph to account for the state of the course, which I was thankful for. 

The hazards were all fairly simple and easy to negotiate. She cruised through every one of them like it was nothing, no issues whatsoever. The only alteration I made to my planned course was in the 4th hazard, where I decided to go around a jump instead of button hooking the first gate (go in, go out). It was too slick and muddy at that point, and I felt it would just tire her further, so I opted to go around. 

I let her walk a large part of the last 300 meters, as she was very tired by the end of dragging the carriage and our two butts through the horrible, wretched slop on a super steamy, ridiculously humid day. She never quit on me. O has a history of totally checking out when the going gets a little too beyond her, but this time, she showed that she has really matured and that the sport suits her. She was tired - SO tired - but when I asked her to trot on, she trotted on. She never quit, and she never said no. For that alone, I was so proud of her.

It's pretty poor camera footage - I didn't place the GoPro very well, so I will try again this weekend. If you turn the volume up high you can hear me talking some!



We finished under the time and clean. She was very hot and breathing pretty heavily at the vet, so we dropped the carriage and went to vigorously cooling her. Right about this time, poor B2 got the call that one of her dogs had to go in for emergency surgery (he's okay!), and she had to take off to get home. Poor B2... she had to get soaking wet all weekend, almost heat stroked out a million times, never got her proper coffee, had to deal with my ruthless taskmaster orders, and then her dog almost kicked the bucket. I don't know if she'll ever want to go with me again!

After about 20 minutes of aggressive cooling, handwalking, and grazing, we went back to the vet, and were cleared. O was quite fine by then, which meant we were officially finished!

With our excellent cones and marathon, and halfway decent dressage, we finished 2nd! We scored about 20 points better overall than we did at Sunrise Ridge, and we were only two points behind the first place finisher (who was also the first place finisher at Sunrise Ridge). 

We leave TODAY for Oklahoma... oh man!!! Wish us luck!!!!

Pine Hill HDT 5/28-5/29/16 - Day 1, Dressage and Cones

Saturday dawned bright and early - and thankfully sunny. Unfortunately, it was also ridiculously hot and humid. Like, REALLY hot and humid. We got to the showgrounds around 7, where we when cleaned O's stall, fed her, refreshed her water, and took her for a walk. It was early, and we weren't properly caffeinated yet, not to mention the fact that it felt like we were drowning in the swampy air. 

B2 was not amused

O kept looking at the jumps going, I did my time doing this BS and I don't like it!

Sexy pose

I walked the cones course again a few more times. It wasn't a terribly flowy course - you would be going along and then suddenly have to do a literal rollback or  tight 180 to get to the next set of cones. The course went like this, with a few minor changes:

And yes, two of those are "skinnies" like in jumpers/eventing - they are 5 cms narrower. It's already pretty tight as it is! Not to mention the entire course was TOTALLY underwater. 

We readied for dressage, and off we went. O was a little resistant for the first couple of minutes, but then she settled right in. The one thing she would not do - she would not stop to rest. I tried several times to just take a nice walk break, and while she would walk for a bit, she always jumped back into into the trot when she was done with that. If we were at home we would be discussing that, but when trying to keep O quiet and sensible during a warmup... well, you don't push your luck. You don't pick a fight. If she wants to trot, well then we trot. Some old ladies were tittering to B2 about how I needed to force her to walk because it was for her own good, and B2 had to be like, you don't understand. There is no forcing that horse.

So, we trotted. And it paid off. Once in the arena for our dressage test, O put out a really solid performance. There were things that need work - she wasn't terribly forward, and her walk work was kind of eh, but she didn't put a foot wrong and she was extremely obedient. Especially compared to Sunrise Ridge, which was just a disaster, it was an exceptional test. The scoring was extremely tough - there were two judges and there were nearly always at least 20 points between their judging methods, people were scoring 80s from one judge and 60s from the other. (It's more like eventing dressage in that you get points versus percentages, but where an eventing dressage test is good if it is in the 30s, a driven dressage test is good if it is in the 50s. 40s is exceptional. 60s is kind of okay, 70s and 80s are not good. And someone did score in the 90s! 

We were in 3rd after dressage, right behind a fancy Friesian. It's kind of hard to compete against that kind of mover, although the one judge did place me ahead of her. The first place person was the same one that beat us at Sunrise Ridge (and she will beat us again in Oklahoma), but her test was scored 10 points harder than it was at Sunrise Ridge, and it was a nearly idential performance because that horse is basically perfect. So, I imagine if the scoring was 10 points harsher at this show, then I did pretty well! Our score was a 61.72, which sounds horrible on paper, but I really thought it was a good test for O. I was happy with it. 

From the dressage, we went right over to cones. I really enjoy cones, and the mare does very well at them, but at these bigger shows the clearance is set tight, 30-35cms. That sounds like a lot of space, but it's really only about 11-13 inches of space. Split that in half, and it's about 6 inches on either side of your wheels. And you're going fast, and turning, and trying to remember where you're going, and accommodating for terrain at the same time. For a rookie like me who is still learning how to gauge where I need to be in order to not murder the cones, it's tricky.

But because O was right with me for her dressage test, she was right with me for the cones. She was wonderful. We had our first ever clean cones! We've always had knockdowns before but this was the first time with no knockdowns. We also only got 0.7 time faults, for being just a hair slow due to the wet weather. This meant we won the cones in our division! Everyone else had knockdowns and time. This moved us up into 2nd place!

O was hot and breathing by the time we walked all the way back up the hill. Not surprising really - it was so steady and humid out, and she is not used to working in humidity. We cooled her out and took her for a graze. About this time, people started wandering by and asking about her. I've talked about some of the weird things people have said to me at these shows before, but it keeps surprising me that it keeps happening. Eventers aren't like that, or at least eventers on the east coast and midwest aren't like that. Texans tend to be super nosy anyway, so I can't really tell if it is due to being Texan or just because of the sport itself. I'm under the impression that people don't always know what to do with me or think of me when they see me roll into these shows. I'm young compared to them - half their age, or more than half their age - and I look kind of alternative. I have half a shaved head. I don't *look* like I should be at a carriage driving show with all of these old bats. I can't tell if they're just trying to make sure they're solidly dominant over me, or if they just think I'm a bother, but they aren't afraid to backhandedly comment on either myself and my looks, or on my horse. One of them told me she was pleased and surprised than I could "actually dress yourself properly like a lady" during the show, because I "looked so edgy, I didn't know what you were going to do! I thought oh no, what is that doing here!" Something to that effect. I tried to laugh and said what, did you think I was going to put spikes on all of my gear? And for a second I thought she was going to say yes, but she thought better of it. Another lady drove up to me in a golf cart, and started asking about O. I gave her the usual rundown of her history - that she was nuts, that she did not cut it as an eventer, but that it was easy to break her to drive. I told her from first long lining to first trotting down the road hitched to a cart was only two weeks, which of course is completely true. The look on her face could have peeled paint. Her jaw was slack, her nose was crinkled, and she looked at me like I was the most idiot bumpkin psycho she had ever seen. The only thing that she could get out of her mouth was, "well, THAT'S weird." I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything.

I do sometimes miss the north, when nobody cared about anybody else, so they didn't bother you. Texans just love to gossip and make everyone else's business into their own. They'll be there to help you out if you ask for it, but they'll whisper about you when you turn around. It's been a little hard for me to understand.

Anyway. 

That mud was just from dressage and cones!

Following lunch at a local Mexican restaurant, we had a competitor's meeting at 3pm about the marathon. The organizer felt that the course had improved enough to run the marathon in the morning, but they were moving the start back a hour. They were hoping it would continue to dry over the day. B2 and I went out to walk the first part of the course, which was all still total slop, and I almost heat stroked her out about 10 times. It was HOT. Thankfully, one of our friends came along in a golf cart and we were able to get her back to get some ice on herself and cool her temperature down. 

It looks like she's frolicing, but actually she's just desperately running for the water!

O got a second bath at the end of the day with her magnesium shampoo, and we also had to go to the store to get electrolytes, which I had forgotten. I had no idea it was supposed to be SO hot and gross and humid all weekend. O usually doesn't like to eat her elytes, but theses ones had sugar in them (which I usually won't buy), but in this case, I figured it would help her actually finish them, and I was right.

We headed back to Gonorrheacrabs Inn for the evening and passed out... ready for the next day and the really fun stuff!

T-Minus 4 Days until Pine Hill!

Holy cripes!! Where did time go so fast?? How is Pine Hill already here? And Stillwater is only a week after that!

O at the Romp... I ordered the professional pictures so we will have them soon to share! 

I don't know about you, but before shows I start to get anxious. Especially with a horse like O, I really need to be careful about overdoing it. When she is tired, or a little bodysore, or anything of the sort, she is just all kinds of difficult to deal with. It's always been a habit of mine to never work my horses the day before a show - possibly this is partly due to my nerves (o god am I going to nitpick at my horse and piss them all off right before a show and then everything will be terrible and we all will DIE), partly due to the timing (so much easier to not have to worry about working them and instead focus on the million other things to do), and probably mostly due to the fact that literally the one and only time I have ever worked a horse at the showgrounds the day before the event, I ended up in the hospital with a severe head injury. Obviously that was just a fluke thing, but it leaves an impression on you, and ever since that happened I've never been able to work a horse the day before a show ever again - just superstition, I suppose.

I do also need to be careful about under-doing it. O works hard for a living, but a lot less hard than a lot of horses do. Gone are the days of working my horses 6 days a week, every week, forever. My stint in endurance, however brief, taught me that horses don't need to be hammered on if they know their job. They need to be fit and sound, absolutely, and their bodies need to be able to handle the stresses of whatever you throw at them, but you don't need to exhaust them. Unfit horses get injured for sure, but overly worked horses also get injured. (I mean, ANY horse can get injured, but still. You know.) O has several years of fitness under her belt and a good baseline there - plus she has been showing regularly and also getting worked during the week. When we move up, she'll need an increase in fitness and an increase in training, but as for right now she is well fitted up and capable of handling herself. But she doesn't work nearly as much as I have worked horses in the past, and sometimes I feel that I don't work her enough. It's a super fine line to walk with a mare like her - what is too much, and what is not enough? 

Thankfully, she does not ever need to be worked down for working down's sake. She's that horse that you can take her out of the field after long periods of doing little or nothing, and she's exactly the same. Hot and ready to go, of course, but exactly the same. She's not going to pull out the aerials at a show just because she hasn't worked in a few days. She has thankfully always been this way, even when I first got her. So, I tend to err on the side of caution before shows and just let her do nothing for a few days - keep her body feeling good, and focus on everything else I have to do. Admittedly, she'll be in a stall at Pine Hill for the first time in her entire show career, so I expect I may be doing a bit of lunging before I hitch up...!

My pre-show ritual usually starts the weekend before a show, especially if it is a big one or one where we will be staying overnight. It's pretty similar to what I was doing when showing Gogo seven years ago (holy crap, 7??), save for the fact that I definitely don't bother to wash and vacuum out my smelly stinky Patron truck anymore. I mean, I will actually bother to clean it tomorrow, because it needs it desperately and I can't exactly expect poor B2 to have to sit on top of mounds of random accumulated stuff in there (which tends to happen when you spend nearly your entire day in your truck), but as for shining up all the chrome polish.... nahhh. 

Anyway, for show prep, I make a list of all the million things I need to do, and sort them into days. I didn't get a chance to get anything started this weekend, so had to settle for starting yesterday with an email to the organizer to make sure we were solidly in and all was well, making a checklist of things that needed to be done, and... yeah, that was pretty much all that got done yesterday. As for today, after work I cleaned out and organized my trailer tack room, sorted through all my show clothes and packed them into the trailer, put all my feed and water buckets into the trailer, and washed O's leg boots. Tomorrow, I'll wash and pack my harness, pack hay and shavings and feed, put new bedding into the trailer, make sure I am stocked on Ulcergard and Pro CMC, go get a new trailer spare (and actually, probably get new tires on the truck too since it's about time for that anyway), clean out my rancid truck, and go get a massage for myself. One thing that has definitely changed since I was showing Gogo is the fact that I am no longer starving and poor, and can do things like go get a massage for myself and buy new truck tires without feeling overly taxed. I've worked super hard to get where I am today, and looking back over this expanse of time makes me feel proud. It hasn't been easy, and sometimes I feel like I should stop for a second and congratulate myself a little bit. I've worked my holy buttcheeks off to get here. I deserve it.

Thursday, I'll tidy up O's hairdo and feet, check to make sure which boots are fitting her at the moment, pack my clothes, get the hotel info, and make one last going-over of all the things I'll need to have packed. I work all day on Thursday as well, so there won't be a lot of time, and some of these things may get pushed to Friday morning. On Friday, I need to get hay and fill all the weekend haybags for the home horses, wash and load the carriage, hook up the trailer, load up the mare, and GO! 

The best part is - there is another great big show the weekend after, so I get to do it ALL OVER AGAIN next week! 

If any of you have nothing better to do next weekend (or the weekend after) and you live near Pine Hill (or up near Stillwater OK), come on down (or up)!

NTW Sunrise Ridge 4/3/2016 - Marathon and Final Results

What a weekend we had. We obviously had some serious lows, which you've already heard about, but we finished on an extremely high note on Sunday with an amazing trip on the marathon!

Drama posing mare and B2, ready to hitch up and get on with marathon!

O was really into the dramatic poses all weekend

B2, R (her husband and also our comedic relief for the weekend) and I walked the marathon course on Saturday after we were done with dressage and cones. Since this post is already going to be extremely picture-heavy, I'm not going to waste more space with individual pictures of the obstacles on course - but you can see them all listed here! You can also see the competitor list, omnibus listing, cones course map, times, and other things there. It's a great resource for us competitors to have ahead of time! B2 has never done a marathon before and this was only my second one ever, so while we knew what was going on and how we were going to approach every obstacle, there was still an element of, "ok let's not kill ourselves today." We just wanted to get through alive without messing up!

As a recap, Saturday just sucked. It was awful. O was not playing the game, there was all the stupid drama with people going nuts with rumors, and the like. We were in 6th after our crappy dressage, then moved up to 3rd after cones - but despite that, I couldn't let everything that had happened go. I was so upset by it that I stewed about it all night long. I'll be the first to admit that I'm kind of an emotional cripple who doesn't handle these kinds of situations well inside my head - it's just part of who I am. I was still so bothered by it still in the morning that I very nearly scratched from the show and stayed home. I didn't even want to go. I was really and truly that upset by it. (Caveat: since I don't think I was clear before, I am *totally* okay with the TD coming over to check a horse with a rumored injury - that's their job and what they are supposed to do! That part is totally fine. It's just the fact that someone started the rumor, and the fact that the whole thing was inappropriately handled and information was allowed to leak out all over the place... those were the problems.)

But, I didn't want to let it drag me down. I didn't want to throw away my 3rd place just because I'm a hyperemotional trainwreck, and I didn't want to let the old bats who were causing the drama to get any satisfaction out of the whole thing. So I got up, put my big girl panties on, pulled my mare in from the pasture, and headed out to the show.


O's specialties are her everlasting endurance, speed, and ability to turn on a dime easily. This is what is going to make her an exceptional marathon horse, and a good cones horse too if yours truly can actually steer properly some of the time. She doesn't have a lot of patience for intricate things, slow work, or anything involving a lot of aids coming from me. She would rather be left to do it on her own without a lot of input on my part. This makes dressage kind of a mental challenge for her - she might end up being like a lot of those event horses you see that kind of just fumble through their dressage but get out and eat the XC up. Moreso than in eventing (or at least it seems that way to me), you must have a horse that can handle the marathon and the cones and not just have a good dressage test - especially in the lower levels of eventing these days, you can have a killer dressage and as long as you can flop your way around a few jumps you'll win it every time. It's not quite that easy in combined driving, which was reflected in the way our placing lept from nearly last to nearly first by the end of the weekend!

B2, O, and myself all went for a nice walk before the marathon began. People were out there trotting around and getting all busy, but we just walked. Why waste energy? We had five hilly kilometers to tackle, no rush for us!

The countdown began.... I started my watch... off we went!


There were five hazards/obstacles to tackle along the way. She handled every one of them like a total champ, including the second one which I very nearly messed up - in each one of the obstacles, there is an enter/exit gate, and several lettered gates you have to go through in consecutive order. The gates are live until you cross them, then they are dead and you can double back through them as much as you like. Training level only does A, B, and C, but there are also gates D and E for the upper levels. You must go through them in order, otherwise you get eliminated. They try to trick you too - they'll put gate B in front of where A is to make you go around, and similar things. You as the driver must walk the course ahead of time and choose your route - and there are multiple ones to take. You play to your horse's strengths and the terrain, and while the obstacles aren't timed in Training level, they are timed at all the levels above it and you must get through them as fast as you safely can.
In the second obstacle, I flew right past A without even realizing it. The obstacle was full of trees and I got lost immediately - thankfully B2 yelled out that I had missed it! I managed to turn her around at the walk, get back through it, and continue on our way without further incident.

What a champ she was. She was just awesome. I didn't have to do anything, just sit back, steer, and enjoy it!

We can flying into the 300km-to-finish marker. We were coming in hot, so I had to slow her way down to make sure we didn't come in under our speed time of 20:05. Just like in eventing, there is a speed time and an obtimum time (which was 23:05 for us). You must come in that window, and if you go on either side of it you get time pentalties. I make very sure that my watch read more like 20:35 or thereabouts when I cross the line, just to play it safe. This will come into play soon.

She cooled out well, was checked by the vet at the finish, got a bath, and took a nap back at the trailer while we waited for results. B2 and R eventually went home, and I continued waiting.

The scores were posted. And... I had 7 time penalties, which means I had about 30-odd seconds of being over or under the time allowed. Since I had been watching my stopwatch so carefully. I knew it wasn't correct. The TD, who was gracious and kind all weekend, took me up to the office and we looked at the official scorecards. And it turns out we did catch a mistake made! It was truly an honest one - whoever handwrote my start time made a 6 look like a 5, which subtracted a whole minute from our time, landing us solidly below the speed fault time. This is why it's always important to check your watch and be sure! It was corrected, the penalties removed, and it landed us in 2nd place for the marathon. We moved up to 2nd overall!!!

Ready for a flood of pictures from dressage and cones? Brace yourselves...

My strategy for cones: go reallllllly slow

It had highs. It had low. It had drama. It had excitement. It had all the makings of a good Hollywood blockbuster. And it was only just the first show of the season!!

O has a well deserved bit of time off now, then our next show is on the 17th. Can't wait!!