We shipped from Aston Le Walls to Blenheim on Tuesday afternoon and were one of the first to arrive. Lucky for us we were stabled in the barn with the New Zealand horses so I figured Quincy would be getting good advice from his neighbors. Quincy bounded off the lorry, suddenly realizing that all of this crazy travel had a purpose! Once Quincy was settled into his stall Jeff and I went out to continue our search for a wheelbarrow which took many miles and more than an hour. I never would've guessed it would be such a difficult task but in the end we prevailed. Back at Blenheim Quincy got to go on his usual first ride which consisted of wandering around the schooling field in a hackamore finding nice patches of grass to nibble on along the way. There was actually quite a bit more grazing than wandering...
Wednesday started with a nice dressage school having David watch over our work. Quincy felt great and we worked on solidifying a good warm-up routine to get him loose and engaged without making him feel like he was having to work too hard (after all he's still very lazy at heart). David also helped me to focus on better timing of my half-halts to prepare for my lateral work and that was just the tune-up I needed to solidify several movements.
The rider briefing wasn't until 1 so we got Quincy beautified and braided so that I'd be able to walk the cross-country after the briefing. And I'm glad we made time to do that... first impression was that the course was enormous and packed with technical questions (which were also enormous). That definitely got my heart rate up a little but nothing compared to the jog... looking back I really think the issue was simply the jog surface but in the moment I had no idea why my horse was suddenly trotting short in front and off we were to the hold area. There was no obvious reason but unfortunately he continued to jog the same in the hold area. It actually got to the point of weighing whether or not to represent... then jeff said to go once more and just focus on keeping him straight and in the middle of the lane (the road was actually crowned) and suddenly he seemed ok so we decided we had nothing to lose. I focused on keeping him straight and not allowing him to dawdle and he jogged just fine for the ground jury. I really hoped this was not an indication of how the weekend was going to go! We decided to push on as usual and not read too much into the way he had jogged so I tacked up to go out for my usual Wednesday gallop. He felt great...gotta love horses sometimes.
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