At the weekend I decided to show my dedication by driving 65miles to Rennes to take part in a dressage 'entrainement' competition. Along the lines of a local unaffiliated dressage comp you'd have to drive twenty minutes down the road for in England. BUT this is France and training competitions are not come by easily.
We really went for Ned as I was rather hoping he would go to his first trial in a fortnight and I thought he could practice his fancy new moves in an actual arena.I showed him the moves on thursday amazingly he managed to pull them out of the bag on saturday. It was hardly his best test ever but considering his warm up arena antics it was fantastic.He tried his very hardest and the only flunked movement was a rather squiffy reinback. He managed counter canter loops to change of leg through five strides of trot on the diagional,a drab medium trot and a very soft trot to walk and back to walk transition on the other diagional. All in all he was a very good boy, the judge said it was very pleasing, fantastic submission, he just lacked a little umph. I couldn't have agreed more as I rode him with the handbrake half on when there was really no need.
Turnip, pictured (the phone broke at the start on Ned's photoshoot) was a different story. He was a complete plonka in the warm up and through the test, this was one of his nicer moments, there were many no feet on the floor moments and horizontal leaps and swirls. However I've enudred Turnip for three years now and I saw a lot of improvement, even if it wasn't visible to anyone else. He did make a degree of effort to perform part of every movement, he didn't have a complete temper tantrum, he did accept white boards probably weren't harmful and we did get a 7 for the final halt!
The judge said he was rather hard to mark, he looked tight and angry, she was spot on, but then she didn't see him last time!