Last weekend Galahad and I went to our first competition in several months.  It was a riding club dressage event and I was very happy to be out competing again.

The warm up was slightly interesting – there were cross country jumps stacked around the arena which Galahad thought were pretty scary – I spent half my time trying to persuade him to go near them.  Then the rain started coming down in earnest.  I had forgotten my contact lenses and before long my glasses were covered with rain and I could barely see.

We got them cleaned up and ourselves into the indoor arena for our actual test.  Galahad settled down nicely and did what felt like a pretty good test.  I didn’t think it was amazing but he did everything I asked and – best of all – he picked up the correct canter lead on both reins.  As I said last week, that’s something on which we have really been working hard so I was especially pleased to get it right.

Before long we were called for our second test and again it felt like a nice, safe clear round.  The canter leads were correct and this time our shapes felt a little more accurate.  I was so pleased with Galahad!

Really, the canter leads made my day but it got better.  When the scores were posted I found I had scored 60.53% and 62.93%.  We got our usual comments about Galahad being, ‘Economical with the energy’ but the judge also made some nice comments about the trot which were good to see.  We placed second and fourth which was obviously great but even better the scores were good enough to qualify us for a local dressage championship next week.  So exciting!