Demo Day

High Country Working Equitation did a Demo Day today as part of a social event to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. It was held at Plane View Farms (where the mattress incident happened a year ago) and we had a seasoned rider demonstrate their level for Intro to Intermediate B. I was the rider chosen for Intermediate A. The above video is of my ride. Below are my thoughts.

1. It did not look as bad as it felt. 

We had warmed up early in the morning, then the horses waited while we did lunch, then we did a little warm up again before standing for 40 minutes before actually riding. Guess who didn’t want to get with that program?  Ashke spooked at the wall in the first turn in the double slalom and every right turn after that. He wasn’t very relaxed or willing to stay within our frame. But still, the video did not look as bad as it felt.

2. My anxiety makes Ashke more spooky. 

Guess who didn’t spook during warm up? That’s right, he only got tense and spooky because I was anxious. And I was at the puking stage of anxiety last night at about 1 am, the I-want-to-quit all the things phase of anxiety, and finished up with the crying-while-driving phase of anxiety while hauling over to PVF. But I didn’t die. And the ride was decent, and just like our canter half-passes get better when I ride better, our shows will get better when I get over this horrible anxiety.

3. I can still sit a spook.

It felt like he looked up, saw the bull and went “Oh shit”. I almost came off. I stopped him, made him back up a bit and told him “that’s quite enough”. I felt like I was about to come off, but it didn’t look nearly that bad.

4. Getting angry at him makes things so much worse.

I did not get angry today. I stopped him, reminded him that this was our day job, and kept fucking riding. He settled some after that moment and we finished our ride. He is acting this way because I am projecting feelings he is interpreting as threatening and he stops trusting me. Stopping and backing in the middle of our ride was the best thing I could have done, since that is what I do in my other rides when he hasn’t given me the correct answer, and it helped reset his brain. I think he realized at that point that I wasn’t angry or upset and that this was just business as usual. 

5. Practice makes things better.

If he can learn to do a canter half-passes, then we can learn to ride without anxiety on either of our parts. We just need to keep putting both of us in situations similar to a show environment, until we both stop reacting. There were things I would have thought would have been better from our lessons and practice, however, the tension that we were dealing with in this demo wrecked that. The good news is I didn’t use myself inhaler and didn’t have an asthma attack, even after an 8 minute EOH canter ride.

6. This was our first EOH ride in front of an audience at Intermediate A.

We didn’t ride anything but the dressage test at Expo, so this was the first EOH ride we’ve done at this level. I have practiced a couple of courses but as we have seen, practice is much different than a show environment. Hopefully, this experience will temper our reaction going forward.