I don’t know how I got so far out from the Coachella horseshow without ever wrapping up how it went for all of the horses. I guess I must have updated individual pages and left my poor blog page lonely and forgotten!
The short story is that Thermal 2018 was a fabulous show. Perfect weather, well-behaved horses, and a lot more progress than I had anticipated prior to departure. As always, there was a little drama along the way, but nothing that dampened the great fun we had! The first mess involved having to buy a new truck 2 days before leaving – geez….I don’t wish that upon my worst enemy! Drama part 2 came in the form of a blown trailer tire in the middle of nowhere and not a single correctly-sized lug wrench in my collection of 6 lug wrenches (thank you random BMX bike person who pulled into the gas station at 3am!). And the final piece came in the form of a horse being on the losing end of a wrestling match with my trailer (see Billy’s section below). But outside of that drama the show went smoothly and was a whole heck of a lot of fun. And it’s a good thing, because boy do you have to pay top dollar to have a little fun in this sport!
So horse by horse:
Cassiana SR aged out of the young horse classes for the first time this year, and I was a little bummed to not have the any age group classes to look forward to. So I planned to show her in the 1.30m AO classes for all 3 weeks, not imagining that she would be ready to step up to the 1.40m so early in the season. She was great during the first week with trips to the jump-off in every class. But a couple of unlucky rails and time faults snagged us each time. Something shifted in her brain for week 2, however, and the mare absolutely stepped it up in the best possible way. She finished with two 2nds, a 3rd, and a Reserve Championship in 40-horse classes with blazing fast clean jump-offs. As a coming-8yo, I didn’t push her quite as much as I suppose I could have, but we’ll save that for when she’s a little bit more mature. I can say without reservation, “what a mare!”
I was torn about what to do with her during the third week. It was so much fun to be really competitive, but it was also a great set-up for stepping up. Ultimately I decided that stepping into the 1.40m was going to be a lot easier here at a show where she had already been jumping around the courses and the arenas in the weeks prior. And so we stepped up to the High AO classes in our last week in the desert. Cassie was absolutely phenomenal with lovely rounds and ribbons in the 1.40m High AOs. She had one little “bobble” in the last class that resulted in a rail, and so I stepped her back down to the 1.30m AO class on the last day to end the circuit with an absolutely confident and fun round. And with a high ribbon out of 40+ horses, I would say we accomplished exactly that. I couldn’t be more thrilled with my brave young mare, and couldn’t have asked for a better set-up for the 2018 show season!
FF Evita was a bit of a wild card heading down to the desert this year. She wrapped up the 2017 show season in the 1.10m – 1.20m young horse classes, but very minimal experience due to the fact that she started the season in her first 0.75m classes and had to catch up to her age group through the summer. I didn’t read the prize lists closely enough prior to Coachella, and was surprised to find out that while the YJC 5yo and YJC 7yo classes run at the anticipated “mimimum height” (1.10m and 1.30m respectively), the YJC 6yo classes at Coachella run at the non-minimum height of 1.25m. Go figure! But Evita has been an absolute warrior every step of the way, and so off we went. Day one of week one found us in the 1.10m schooling class set in the GP ring. Evita opted to jump a 1.40m track over those little jumps and so we settled down in the 1.0m ring for the rest of the week. Never did 1.25m seem so far away, lol! But week 2 brought a sense of calm and focus, and so we did 1.0m on day one, 1.15m on day 2, and 1.25m YJC on day 3.
Evita was a bit surprised, no question about it. But she was right there with me every step of the way, and absolutely attacked the course like you can only hope a young horse will do! She was perhaps the most unprepared 6yo at the show, and we had a rail or two in our classes as a result. But at no point did she back off or doubt her ability to get around the courses. No question that she gets to keep her title of ‘warrior” after the courage and heart she displayed over and over again around very large (for her) tracks! Like Cassie, I had hope that she might make it to 1.20m/1.25m by the end of the season, and didn’t expect that she would do it easily within the first few weeks of the year. Now we’ll settle in the next month of schooling with some lessons on how to maintain momentum to a big fence while also figuring out how to sit and wait a little bit. Not a tough lesson, and one that I think she’s already figured out at home. But we’ll see how well it sticks when we head of to Tbird in May.
FF Bella was another wild card. Not because she had anything surprising to offer….after all, I had the word of my Germans that she is a gem of gems. But she hadn’t ever seen a hunter fence, let alone a full, flowered, decorated course in the high pressure environment of a show. Suffice it to say that I now understand why they called her “the robot” in Germany. The below round is her first time ever in that arena and over those fences (we never even hacked in that ring prior to that class) and the mare was just a complete and total machine. Perhaps the highlight of her sensability and intelligence came on the major windstorm day. The wind was blowing so hard that it blew over several portapotties and was blowing jumps down left and right. We had a giant sunflower jump blow ONTO US as we walked into the ring for one of the classes. Good girl Bella simply stepped out of the way and continued walking like she’s accustomed to being attacked by jumps every day, lol! Another jump blew down while we cantered past it (similarly no reaction), and still another blew down as we landed from it. And the worst incident of all? A plastic bag blew into her leg and got stuck as she cantered into a line. Momentarily surprised, she rolled a rail, but jumped the fence and continued down the line like it was no big thing. What a stellar, stellar, stellar brain! That round is the 4th video down (below the jumper round).
In the final week I set up a junior rider to show her in the medal and equitation classes. That unfortunately fell apart due to cross-entry issues. So on a whim I stuck her in the jumper ring, curious to see how she would handle the change from 2 weeks of hunters back to her home ground in the jumper ring. Despite not having schooled in or around the jumper rings all week, Bella rose to the challenge and picked up blue ribbons in all of her classes. It would be tough to find a horse that’s more fun to show. Now that we’re home and have a little time to play around we’ll start bumping up the fence heights to get ready for the 1.20m AO classes at the next show.
William L was supposed to be the “ringer” of the group. At 17 years of age and after 9 years of consistent showing and winning in the 1.40m – 1.50m, the hopes were that he would start off the season strong the the High AO Jumpers as usual. But Murphy’s Law had a little something to say about that and as we neared Palm Springs on our 22 hour drive, he did something that resulted in a leg over a divider and ultimately resulted in a broken hind splint bone. So he was walked off of the [shockingly bloody] trailer and straight into the veterinary clinic for examination and x-rays. To the vet’s surprise, despite a completely mangled leg (underneath a full set of shipping boots), the broken splint bone seemed to be the only notable thing outside of the macerated skin on his cannon bone and the wounds way high up on the inside of his leg, and he seemed to be pretty darn comfortable walking and moving around. The vet dismissed the broken splint bone as “nothing serious” and said that it was possible he could be showing by the end of the week.
We spent a couple of days handwalking and lightly lunging. Then the rest of the first week hacking in the giant warm up rings. He definitely did not fit into the “back to showing by the end of week 1 time line.” Week 2 we stepped back to the jumps and I let him be my guide. For the first few days I would stop jumping as soon as he shifted his weight off of that hind leg on take-off (each day the height that caused the step was a little bit bigger than the day before). By the end of the second week he was schooling 1.40m comfortably. So we gave him that weekend and the first half of the next week off to do some long trail rides and towards the end of week 3 we stepped back into the ring. He had a couple of rails in each class, so I wouldn’t say that he was fully back to normal, but he was clearly happy to be out and felt really good for his first time out for the year. But with all that happened, we opted out of the Classic on the weekend and left it at the 3 classes, which I was already incredibly grateful to have been able to show in without feeling like I was pushing Billy too hard. Once again he has shown me that he has the heart of a champion. At no point was there even a sliver of doubt in his mind about whether he was capable of doing his job.
So the really short wrap up of our adventure was that we got to enjoy a lot of sunshine and a lot of success! And now for the rest of the season…..