Just a quick little update about the Princess Lissell. Her first competition back from summer vacation was this past weekend at Loudoun Horse Trials (held at the Oatlands Plantation in Leesburg).
I tried a new technique with Lissell for dressage warm up. We hacked down, worked for 15 minutes and went into the ring. And this is where we start the good news / bad news portion of this blog ...
Good news: Lissell was great. Stayed with me the whole time. Stayed in front of my leg. A little fussy, but I was happy.
Bad news: The judge hated it. We scored a 49.1!
Good news: We weren't in last place. Actually not even second to last. Sweet!
Lesson learned: Extend the warm up a little bit longer until Lissell takes a breath, then just do stretchy work until we go in.
Next up was stadium. The course was on the side of a hill. No biggie.
Good news: Lissell felt great!
Bad news: Warm up fences were all up hill. Ugh. This is not mine and Lissell's strong suit. We're still working on getting her to engage her (rather large) hind end uphill to fences. Frustration does not even begin to describe my emotions as we punched out rail after rail.
Good news: I put the craptastic warm up behind me and went in ready to rock.
Bad news: I lost my stirrup twice and tried to fall off in the triple.
Good news: My horse is saintly and saved my patootie and we only pulled two rails.
Lesson learned: Don't go 2 months without going to a horse show. You'll be seriously rusty in the ring.
The next day we went back for cross country. Only good news this time ... Lissell is AMAZING! Seriously! She just locked on to every jump and was machine like.
Love, love, love this horse!
