Poplar Place: In the Sandbox

Well.

Needless to say, dressage did not go as planned.

At Rocking 3, I discovered that the best amount of warmup for Dante was 20-25 minutes. Since my ride time for Poplar was 9:24, I got on at 9 am.

Only to discover that the FEI riders were not allowed in the main warm up, where we had ridden the previous day.

Um. Ok. Not great, but I guess we'll deal. Unfortunately, I spent the next ten minutes finding the FEI warmup, leaving me only about 15 minutes to actually warm up. Meanwhile, Dante is wide eyed because he is in a warmup he has never been in before (it generally takes about forty-five minutes to completely settle him in a warmup, so I always try to ride longer in the warmup the day before, which only works when I'm actually riding in the ring that I will warm up in). So tense the entire warm up. Great.

Go over to the main ring, and we get more tense. As I'm riding around the ring, I realize it feels like I'm riding a firecracker. Uh oh.

I managed to keep a lid on it for the trot work, and while our lateral work wasn't great, it wasn't really that below our usual standards. We just aren't great at lateral work yet. His medium trot was actually quite nice because all I had to do was let go instead of pushing him. Unfortunately, the walk work and canter work was tense. We mostly held it together, going for very conservative in our first medium canter. But the final medium canter, Dante GRABBED the bit out of my hand and galloped down the side, only relinquishing control when I wrestled him for the bit.

Awesome.

So yeah, 68.something, and I'm 24th out of 31. Someone notably did score a 91, so I was safe from being DFL.

Then Ellen and I walked the cross country course again, me taking pictures the whole way. I intended to post the course walk tonight, but other things got in my way.

I spent the afternoon watching dressage and unsuspectingly allowing my skin to bake to a nice lobster red. Hello, summer. Lots of beautiful dressage tests. Rebecca Howard sits the trot so amazingly well, I want to sit the trot like her one day. Clark's horse Loughan Glen is pretty fabulous too.

In the evening, a few of us went to dinner, then watched International Velvet in a hotel room. I had never actually seen International Velvet, and was quite unimpressed with the movie, although I thought random car explosion was random. And the fact that it was two hours was a surprise, as Ellen and I got back to our hotel at 1 am! Which is why no course walk tonight.

But here's a taste of the weather we've been getting here. Tomorrow's forecast? Scattered thunderstorms. Of course.

(The beautiful cross country fields of Poplar Place Farm.)

To top it off, my alma mater, UK beat their number one seeded opponent, Ohio State, tonight in the NCAA tournament. Elite Eight, here we come! CATS CATS CATS!