Are you ready for the shower story yet! Sorry, it is still a far place away. There is a lot that happens in these few days at a horse show, including heat, humidity, exhaustion and sweat
It is now time for our volunteers to set up the reining pattern! My favorite event! I live for reining. If I were 16 years old, I might turn into a full-on reining competitor. Thank goodness I never heard of reining until my second childhood!
Powder is an experienced show horse. She has competed in many a reining class during her seven to eight years of showing. Once she recognizes that she is in a reining pattern, she loves to speed up. Thankfully this pattern started differently than most of the other reining patterns. The pattern Stars with the rollbacks! I’ve never ride this pattern before. By the time we got to the second rollback, Powder was in it! She knows to speed up and the do the slide stop. Sadly, I hadn’t yet worked out the cue for instant stop, so our slide stops were without the slide part. We sparked up a notch or two of life for the reining circles. Two fast and one small slow circle. ZOOM! We made the two big fast and the small circle, but we failed to show slow!
Our pattern was perfect. We nailed it! Thanks to Jenny who stood at a critical spot outside the arena and said “go left”. In many years past, few people entered the reining class and I was always assured of a ribbon. I’ll be double darned that a ton of people entered this class. My class. I own this class. Stay away! Sigh. Who invited all these people?
Powder and I won Reserve Reining Champion and got that beautiful red ribbon! We were a slice of heaven in that arena! At least I felt like I was riding in heaven….
Those other competitors are going to practice reining and make my life holy hell next year. If they don’t practice, the versatility bench crowd will help them. Drat!
We had one young handsome rider on a beautiful dun palomino. Jeff got confused on the first spin. The horse is to do 360 turn, four times. It is really tough to keep track of the number of spins you are doing. During my first spin, I didn’t know if I had completed 3 or 4 spins so I went another 360. Thank goodness it was needed. Back to Jeff. Jeff had a tough time on the first set. So the marvelous crowd counted his spins the second set of 4 360 spins. The crowd counted loudly 1, 2, 3, 4! The crowd is a great group of people!
I had to get off and move my body around on the ground again after my turn. Groan
You must see the pattern again!
