Cob Jockey

I got to the barn on Sunday at a leisurely 1pm for my first ride after visiting California, and my trainer stuck her head out of the indoor and yelled at me:

"Hey!  I just had a cancellation for my next hour, someone's horse pulled a shoe, do you want a lesson?"

"YES!"

"How about we try jumping?"

"YES!"

Arena expansion progress.  Everywhere you see the crushed lime sub-base will soon be arena!  Ahhhh!!!

And that's how we ended up jumping for the first time in probably six months.  I had no idea what was going to happen.  But...

Connor was awesome!

We spent most of the lesson taking courses of 2' verticals and he could not have been better.  Distances were great, he was adjustable, and he jumped like a normal horse.

"Normal horse"

It gave me hope.  Maybe, just maybe, we're going to event this year.  My trainer and I started discussing what a return to eventing would look like for us if we were to do it this year.

1. Stadium jumps til he's bored.
2. An XC school in which we get him actually tired before he goes out there, so we have none of that back-cracking bucking nonsense he's done the last few times he's been on XC.  Then we'd school small fences, again, until he's bored.
3. As many XC schools without nonsense as we can get.
4. Schooling HT.
5. Maybe go rated in September or October, depending on how successful we are with steps 1-4.

Still one of my favorite pictures of all time.  Nobody told him it was a Starter fence, he could've cleared the BN fence next to it.

I'm still aggressively pursuing straight Dressage competitions too - I don't feel a need to pigeonhole us into a particular discipline.  We'll try all sorts of fun stuff until he tells me no.