The First Time

Does anyone remember the Wendy’s commercial from a few years back where the two guys go somewhere freezing cold and after eating some chicken sandwich they get warm enough to strip down to their underwear?  I don’t eat fast food very often but at this point I’d be willing to give it a try!  Its back to acting like the dead of winter so I’m stuck inside writing another post sadly unrelated to Cowboy.  Ugh!

I’ve had a request to write about former horses (before Romeo).  That post will take time and work to put together since there are so many pictures I want to include, and right now I don’t have time for either so instead I narrowed it down to two options:  The saga of my first event with Romeo and the night we got incredibly lucky at the race track (I promise it’s a cleaner story than it sounds!).  The saga of my event with Romeo won so let’s see how good my memory is!

I’m sure a lot of people have a grand story about how they decided to become an eventer.  I decided that I wanted to be an eventer when I stumbled upon the Omnibus listing for Jump Start on a web site.  I knew what eventing was for the most part from my year in Pony Club but that was about the extent of my experience.  I did what any reasonable person would do when they decided to try something for the first time, I bought a truck, determined that my parent’s old blue stock trailer would stay in one piece for at least the next year, and registered with the USEA.  I also did one mini trial and one cross country schooling with Romeo and then signed us up for our first event:  Novice at Spring Bay 2008.

I had never been to Masterson Station and no one told me that Spring Bay is notorious for interesting weather.  In “no one’s” defense I didn’t ask and at that point, I probably wouldn’t have cared.  I knew that Romeo and I were going to be rock stars.  Emily and I loaded up the trailer, reserved the cheapest hotel in the area and headed down to the Horse Park.  Included in my packing were outfits for a potential jog up, yea I should have done more homework!

I wish I had a video of our first dressage test.  I thought it felt pretty good at the time, but I’m sure the judge wondered when they started allowing gray giraffes to compete.  Romeo’s head was in the clouds the whole time and I’m not sure I even knew what bending was.  We did manage to stay in the arena and I managed to remember my test, so there was a small victory.  Before the event I was hoping for a top 3 finish, however the score board quickly gave me a reality check, we scored a 49.  I think Romeo got brownie points for being pretty.  He is good at that.

Cross country was right after dressage so we quickly walked my course and I decided that the jumps were fairly small so I didn’t have anything to worry about.  Memorizing where I was going would have been nice but since the jumps were small, everything else was going to be easy too right?  Wrong!  The first two jumps went pretty well but jump #3 was a big hedge where a horse eating monster lived.  Romeo took one look at that hedge and slammed on the breaks.  There was a picture of what happened next, I looked for it today but it’s been removed from the photographer’s web site.  There is probably a good reason for that.   I will try to give you a mental picture.  Romeo’s neck was stretched over the hedge, I was on Romeo’s neck and you couldn’t see the rest of him.  Yea, that pretty much sums it up.  I have a crazy “OMG” look on my face and he is looking at the hedge while trying to figure out what rock just fell on his head.  Somehow I managed to regroup and we cleared it easily on the second attempt.   It was only after about 15 strides had passed that I realized that I had no idea where jump #4 was.  I remember at this moment it crossed my mind that maybe we were not going to place in the top 3 and that maybe eventing was harder than I thought.  We finally found the jump and then managed to finish the rest of the course without any more memorable moments, there was only one problem.  Turns out the time limit wasn’t the point at which you started collecting time faults, the optimal time was.  Huh, that’s odd; I had thought that we had 11 minutes to finish the course.  Add on about 20 more time faults. 

Surprisingly, since it became our nemesis later on, show jumping was VERY uneventful.  Looking back on it now, I am really glad it was, I’m not sure I would have gone home and signed up for another event had it been a total disaster.  We pulled one rail but otherwise put in a nice enough round.  The good news, event #1 was behind us.  The bad news?  We finished next to last on a score of 92.  At least it was a number and not a letter!