May Chatt Hills Show Recap

Our May show was decent, but I'm not sure we improved any from our April show. I did get 3 more qualifying scores for Regionals-- now we're fully qualified for the first level freestyle and need one more score for both first and second levels. Hopefully we will pick these last necessary scores up at the June Chatt Hills show we plan to attend! I still haven't uploaded videos from my rides, but I definitely will post once I do. 

We weren't set up for the best success since both of our rides each day happened to be less than an hour apart during the heat of the afternoon. The BHB does much better in the morning and/or when it's not 90* out in the blazing sun. I'm sure he would have enjoyed more than a 15 minute break to chill out after the first ride before he had to warm up for our second one. I'm sure the same thing will happen to us at the June Chatt Hills show, so I'm in the process of figuring out how to better prepare so that he can have the energy for the second ride of the day. I think we actually crawled through our second day tests and I could barely manage to get a trot lengthening/mediums out of my beastie. 

After this show, I've decided to edit our freestyle some more, at least the last part of it. We received good scores for movements at this show but then the collective marks were 6's straight down, lowering our score to a 65%. I'm not sure if the judge just hated the music or what... So now I'm going to try increasing the difficulty and improving the music even more!

Right now, I'm trying to finish an application for my GMO's Adult Amateur grant award. Having $750 more to spend on training would be awesome! I'm also planning to go to Aiken to train a week with Amber this summer (late July or early August). The BHB will be overjoyed to see her again and I'm sure will show off all his new tricks to her.