Secret's First Horse Show




I made so many "I will update more on this later" comments in my 411 blog, I am not sure where to start!

I will start with something fun. I took Secret to the Tolland County 4-H Fair on August 8th for her first horse show. Other than trips to the trainer and one cowboy mounted shooting clinic with Tim (my younger brother and her owner), she had never been anywhere.

Tim and his friend Alex came with me as grooms. Both boys are seniors in high school and were super helpful. I told them they could help me at a horse show anytime they wanted!

Secret got off the trailer at the horse show and calmly started eating grass. I took her for a walk all over the ring we would be showing in and she took everything in stride. I was very surprised.

Not knowing how she would behave, I got on very early to warm her up. She was fabulous in warmup. At one point during the day a loose horse ran up to her. Another time, a rider was dumped off of a pony right near us and she handled both situations great!

Her classes were okay. At times she thought misbehaving was a group activity :) But she never did anything terrible and always came back to focus. Overall I was very pleased with her.

The most interesting part of the day was the trail class! I had to go back to work and we were pushing the time frame a bit so I rode right over to trail after my last ring class and went in. I had a vague idea of what the course was but made up my own class as we went along. The mailbox was no problem. When we got to the cross rail (I did know we were supposed to walk over that) Secret said no. I said yes. She looked at it for a minute and then used the ground poles and flower boxes as stairs to climb up and over the cross rail very daintily. She did not knock over the jump! For the water hazard (a blue tarp on the ground) she said no and I let her get away with it. The blue tarp was a little strange! The two pictures at the top of this post were taken during our trail class.

Overall it was a lot of fun and a good "first horse show" experience for Secret!

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