Lissell is a mudder

It's no secret that I'm a tad overprotective of the Princess Lissell.  She's not a fan of cold and/or wet.  And this weekend's forecast had both.  So I dug out her rain sheet and sweat sheet, and borrowed Kelley's Back on Track mesh sheet and off we went.  Going to the show I figured we were going to Morven for a very expensive combined test, but I figured we would take it one phase at a time.

Dressage in the indoor.  Check.  Jane was nice enough to drive out to help me warm up and her advice was really invaluable.  When Lissell started to get a little dramatic, off we went leg yielding to the right or left.  I'm pretty sure I was the only rider in warm up doing leg yields across the arena, shoulder-ins down the long side, and lengthenings thrown in here and there.  But hey, whatever is needed to keep things in a forward motion.  Lissell's test was quite respectable for her.  There were only brief moments of hollowness. And those were quickly corrected.  But a tense horse is a tense horse, so we started the day off at the bottom of the pack.  No biggie though.  These days my main goal is to enjoy the day and my horse.  Mission accomplished on both accounts.

Next up was stadium.  All I can say is: Lissell.Is.So.Good.  Seriously.  We've really been working on getting her to go quietly to her fences.  I generally don't have help when warming up at horse shows, so it was really nice to have Kelley there.  Mission accomplished again.  Now I just need to put my leg on.  Details!  Here's the video:

Then we went out to walk cross country.  At this point it wasn't raining, and the ground was fine.  There were one or two spots where Kelley told me to be aware and "take care of your horse." But no big worries.  Kelley also helped me pick out "big girl studs" and off we went.  Of course it starts to rain as we're walking down to cross country, and given where we were parked, I was soaked and shivering by the time we got there.  I jumped 2 things, and went to wait my turn.  There was only one point when I was cantering towards a fence with the cold rain hitting my face that I wondered, "Why the hell do we do this!?"  But it was fine.  Really.  I told myself that if Lissell slipped once I would just pull up, but as I said before Lissell is really good at this jumping thing.  Combined with our monster studs (at least they were monstrous to me, Kelley told me she would have put in studs twice that size for Bomber), all was well.  Event complete.  Horse happy.  Rider happy.  Life is good.

Here's a brief clip of cross country:

Special thanks to Scott and Holly for being chief cheerleaders for the day.  And still smiling at the end of the day!