Wednesday Showing
by Equestriangradstudent
I had a schooling show yesterday, which was my first time taking Abs out. It was just a little Combined Test with the option to school cross country after. I signed up for Beginner Novice. I probably should have gone higher, but I was concerned about the dressage.
Have you ever looked at USEF Beginner Novice Test B? It makes no sense. I learned it the day before the show because I forgot about the dressage phase entirely. There’s about fifty changes of directions. I was worried that I would forget them, but somehow we made it through. Not just made it through, but got a 36.2! That may well be the best dressage score this mare has ever gotten. It’s not brilliant, but it’s good. Good enough for fourth place.
That’s right, we got fourth! Out of twelve, which isn’t huge as far as classes go, but we still beat eight people. Hell yeah.
But it gets better. How? Bonnie Mosser schooled me in the stadium warm up. I think it’s only because Jess told her that she’s my hero, but still. I was coached by Bonnie Mosser!
After all of that, there’s still more. Once the show was over, we went out on their cross country course and played around. We schooled ditches, banks, water and of course the normal logs and coops and such. We didn’t school anything over Novice height, but it was still pretty fun. I got to test out Abs’ responses (which are mostly “you’re dumb, I want to run at that”) and run through fields. We’re discussing changing her bit because I really had no say when she locked on to fences. We jumped a couple unintentional fences because of it. One was coming down a drop, the other was after the water. Both times she sighted a fence that was sort of in line with the one we were supposed to school and went to it while I was trying to stop or turn. My horse is a beast on cross country! Now we just need some communication.
I owe you guys a couple updates, such as a post explaining the name change (I think I may have settled on something) and the review of the Manor that I’ve been meaning to post for two weeks. Soon, I hope!
Equestrian Grad Student 
Woohoo! 4th place! Thats so awesome!
Haha, I remember the first time I did BN Test B I thought the same thing- what, this makes no sense! But after doing it, I much preferred it over A. It actually flows rather nicely, and all my better scores were on B. 🙂 Glad you had a good run!