Mount Holyoke Saturday Sizzler Jumper Show 3/14/09

Gogo is a picture-posing ham.

Yesterday was the afternoon Mount Holyoke Saturday Sizzler Jumper Show! It was just a schooling show, but it was our first off property under the eye of a judge this year, so it counts! All I really wanted to do was get around some full courses cleanly and smoothly, and all in all the day was a great success. We even came home with ribbons to boot! Gogo and I entered Division IV - 2'9"-3'. I thought about adding on a 3'3"-3'6" class, but our final class had been so excellent that I decided to just end with that. Next time we'll be doing Division V for sure. This one was too easy for her! I got on and started to warm up during Division III, and actually did more than I usually do during our warmups - I actually did some dressage-type work instead of just w/t/c/jumps/transitions. In the warmup, she went NUTS over the tiniest little vertical, and then after we had gotten THAT galloping-towards-tiny-fence issue sorted out, promptly miscalculated a really large square oxer (probably about 3'6") and took a rail. Next time over it, she FLEWWWW! I kept the rest of our warming up to walk and trot, and relaxing.

We had three classes - a warm up class that only had 5 obstacles (6 if you count that one of those was an in-and-out), and the two actual count-for-something classes that followed, the Power and Speed class and just the Speed class. In our warmup, we were just CRAZY running around - it felt a little reckless and out of control!! She also SERIOUSLY CRACKED HER BACK over every single fence, nearly jolting me out of the saddle. Crazy mare! The Power and Speed was much smoother, and the course was nice and rideable and curvy. We put in another very solid, very clear round, and even though it felt like we were going REALLY fast, as usual we were NOT going really fast and were 4th in the class. It's those turns that get us.. I like to set us up for a nice straight approach, and hardly ever take the inside turn! Oh well, rather well set-up and slower than rails and a naughty horse. And the final class, the Speed round, was excellent. It was, in fast, the least speedy out of all of our classes, but she was finally settling in (and probably was a little tired too), and was consistent and quiet. I have a video of it, seeing as I asked some nice Mount Holyoke girl to take it for me, but because the camera I got for Christmas is such a piece of crap, the video quality is rather terrible.

Not sure exactly what I'm doing towards to the first fence - I think in reality it wasn't quite as stupid as it looked. Fence 2 was a bit of a bogey and she took a really long spot, and I think you can hear me making some sort of a woo-hoo kind of noise over it, but we made the turn to Fence 3 and had a very nice jump. She also turned well to the in-and-out but took the first one a little hairy (shows how catty she is though!) and had a nice second fence. Cranked over to the skinny, did THE tightest turn I think she's EVER done in her life back around to Fence 6, around the way around to Fence 7, and then lost a TON of time taking our time to the triple bar. That's all right though, because the final fence was REALLY nice and felt great, so I was totally happy with it. And look at her - she didn't even want to stop when we were done! We were 4th in this class as well.

We also won the style award in our division... for being sexy! She got a nice bag of cookies for that :D

The one thing that worries me? They sectioned off the course from the area where people were hanging out WITH PART OF A DRESSAGE ARENA. So here's hoping that the next time we have a nice, relaxed dressage warmup, we don't go into our test breathing fire and going "where's the JUMPS??!!!???!!!??!! There were jumps LAST time!!!"

Oh Gogo, you are the Supermare!