Gia - 879 - horse show!

 I took Gia to the Pipe Opener at the Carolina Horse Park yesterday.  We entered the Starter division combined test again.  Danielle lunged her while I was schooling other students, and she said that Gia was fairly quiet, even sluggish.  Under saddle, she walked fairly quietly up to the warm up arena, and stayed fairly relaxed.  She looked around, and was a little nervous, but not overly tense.  After some walk work, where we did circles, changes of direction, leg yields, etc, I asked for trot, and she was much like she is at home - a little resistant to the up transition, but not anxious otherwise.  We did the same work at the trot, and she remained fairly relaxed.  When we started working on canter she did get a bit more tense.  Our first transition and canter were good, but after that, she was distracted, fussy, crooked, getting wrong leads, some bucking, etc.  Finally, I had to go in the ring, so I decided we would just make the best of it.  She had over a week off prior to this, so I could only ask for so much.  

She's a funny girl.  As soon as we left the warm up ring, and entered the "important" ring, she went (almost) all business.  She still had some tension, but it felt more like "flair", than anxiety.  She felt like quite a show off.  We did struggle to get the right lead canter a few times, but otherwise, the test felt pretty good!  We ended up getting a 34%, and started off in 5th place!

Our jump warm up was even better!  As soon as she got up there, she was excited to get to work, and got right to her job.  We went over a few jumps, and she felt pretty good, so we went to the course.  She was a little nervous, but rideable!  I was able to collect her canter, and allow her to go forward and be free at times.  We ended up jumping clear and finished in second place out of 10 entries!