Performance Dressage

Orange CDI - 19 February 2012 - Grand Prix Kur

I was feeling more confident about the Orange CDI, I had those 2 weeks in between comps to mentally prepare myself better and to try to ride tidier tests and work on fixing those little errors than seem to sneak up in the competition arena. Mr P has so much power that sometimes I find that the Turbo button is jammed on with him and I still trying to control that massive power that he has.

Mr P on the Friday in the Grand Prix not only had the Turbo Button Jammed on it was also Jammed into Super-charged Mode. I came in halted and trotted off and was almost left out of the back of the saddle in the first extended trot. The test had SO MUCH POWER it had huge highlights but it seems to be the more power I have makes it harder to navigate around the Grand Prix track. Unfortunately although the piaffe scored me 8's in my test the passage button had disappeared.

Saturday morning I was back at it trying to regain Mr P's confidence in the Piaffe Passage transitions, again I was able to do with success!!

By the Saturday evening a massive storm had broken out at Orange and all of the riders were so concerned about warming up in the rain, lightning and hail. Heath Ryan was the saviour that night with speaking on behalf of all the riders. The GP Freestyle was delayed by almost an hour and our warn up was in a 20meter round yard for only 15 minutes followed by 5 minutes in front of all the judges and spectators in the main arena, being policed strictly by the officials. To say this was a challenging situation is an understatement but the show must go on as Heath pointed out. I was on close to 10pm at night and the last horse finished close to midnight. Mr P was stirred up from the storm and has never ridden out of his routine at 10pm in the evening so that in itself was a rare situation to be in.

Mr P came into the area and gave his all ... such a brilliant temperament and what a show he put on. So much improvement from Boneo CDI only 2 weeks earlier. It just goes to show that you can constantly improve your performance in just a few weeks if you put your mind to it.

We had so much fun and were delighted to finish with 68.25% - coming second to Rozzie Ryan by half a percent!

By the Sunday it was survival of the fittest. The GP horses were asked to back up first thing in the morning after only 7 hours rest from competition the evening before. Poor Mr P was exhausted but again dug deep and delivered the goods for a really good Grand Prix Special test. With a score of almost 68% is simply fantastic at that level. Again with little mistakes creeping in my test. This time I was only half a percent behind Rozzie Ryan and GV Bullwinkle with a second place again.

It feels like very soon we'll be crossing over that 70% mark ... stay tuned.