The NSE show was this weekend, and I thought (since I had to be there for Kelly anyway) that I would take Sam and show him in the 2'9 hunter division. He's definitely not a hunter, but after last weekend's near-disaster of a stadium round where I nearly missed fence 7, I thought we could use the practice to smooth things out.Things were still a little sticky with my lesson with Holly - I was still not riding forward to my spots and still sitting down a bit too much - and I needed the extra practice. Kelly and I painted a lot of jumps, and Kelly did a fabulous job of decorating them, so they were a real treat to jump. There were even a few that I thought Sam would gawk at, seeing as it was his home turf and he had never seen colorful jumps at home before. He did gawk over a couple, but he is such an honest boy that he went anyway.
As it turns out, there was nobody in our division. They had all stuck with the crosspole classes. So, Mary asked what I wanted to do, and I said set them at mostly 2'6-2'9 - wait, on second thought, set them at 2'9 with some at 3'0 - may as well start practicing over Novice height on a regular basis, since Sam was so obviously bored with the BN jumps at Longleaf. While they were setting them up, I thought that some of them seemed a bit high for 3'0, but Mary promised me that they were accurate, so in we went. Sam had been sitting around with his saddle on for over two hours, just grazing, as we waited for our turn (I hate that aspect of hunter shows), so he was basically going in cold. We cantered around our courtesy circle, and headed for the first line of jumps. He was perfect to the first, and cantered down to the second oxer and gave me a big jump over it, and we had a few sticky jumps due to me not getting into my corners deep enough, but he only took down one rail on the outside line. Of course, we placed first (it's sort of hard not to with being the only one in the class), and everybody on the side lines was cheering. So, we took a quick breather, and went over them again in the opposite direction. This time, it rode like a true hunter round - we nailed every spot and he was foot-perfect - again, to more cheers. I was grinning like an idiot over the last line, because I knew it was good. Sam really needs the challenge of the bigger jumps to wake him up. He's impressed, but not overly so, with the new height, and he's so darned honest about these things.
So, I found out later from kelly that some of those were set at 3'3 and 3'6 - namely, the last big NSE plank jump. Wow. Sam took those like they were a gymnastic exercise. I'm thrilled. Dani got a picture of us going over the last plank and his knees are up - thank God. Mary confirmed that he was "tucked" over every single jump, so that makes me feel better about his technique. I was worried about it since our hanging knees at Longleaf, but this just confirms that he's bored.
Now to work on our flatwork and get it as good as our jumping!
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