Show and Snow Re Cap

At least he is cute!

So long story short we ended up scratching from the show.

The only canter that ring ever saw.

Dressage was a shit show of swinging haunches, being unable to canter to the right, and then only able to canter to the right.  This was the first time I have noticed Uno having problems on his blind side, but man that many rings going at once just exploded his baby brain.  The good news is that he did walk and halt, and the moments in between meltdowns were nice.  As excepted we were in last place.  That was OK, I came to complete not compete.

We had ALL the zoomies.

Then Uno went to warm up to jump and started out as a rock star then started bucking. We watched the BN horses jump around and he just tracked them around the course.  He is really cute that way - he will study what the horses around him are doing.  Then we went and walked and trotted  around the jump warm up.  Then we jumped the cross rail.  He was great.  Then we jumped the verticle - it was still set for the BN division and it scared me. Luckily my husband was there - He has been instructed to repeat, "Leg, Leg, Leg, Leg, Good," in the strides leading up to the jump.  And it was good.  Uno was totally down to party, then he landed and started kicking out his back legs. Like for the first time in his life. He had never bucked under saddle before.  And he kept doing it, no matter what I changed or what we did - buck, buck, buck. Cue ista-fear that I ruined my pony.

Seriously, He is such a good egg.

I thought it might have been saddle fit issues - he has put on like 50 lbs on muscle along his topline this fall, but he was never sore and had no changes to his sweat patterns.  So we scheduled a dressage lesson with the very patient DR.

Then it snowed.

I was out of work for a week, and pony just sat around being loved on.  This meant that we showed up to our lesson with the last ride being over a week and a half before. So YAY! I definitely set us up for success.

I am going to write about the riding takeaways in another post this week, but the  upside is that she thinks the bucking is ulcers.  He does it right after really lifting his belly and no other time.  So we are going to treat for ulcers for 10 days and see what we have.  Until then we will just do some small bareback rides to keep us both happy.