I feel like I've finally started putting all the pieces of the puzzle together and damn, does it feel good! We were a little worried about how the footing would be (considering all the rain we've had lately) so all the horses got studs in. Ace has only had studs a handful of times in his life, mostly when he's done his few CCI***s, so as soon as I put them in and got on it was like he had completely tuned in to another part of his brain that I didn't know he had! 25 years old? More like 5 years old! He was raring to go and I actually had to struggle a bit to get him to pay attention to my half halts! Ace?! Not listen?! What?! It was pretty funny, but he tuned in pretty quickly, even though he was strong almost the whole time. In a good way, I guess. He completely zoned in on the jump he was pointed at and all I had to do was support him to the base and make him wait for it instead of letting him launch from the long spot (His favorite way to jump). We schooled all of the training questions without any problem and did a few of the straight forward prelim questions too! Mogie was going to have us do the prelim/cci* coffin but at that point it was about the end of our school and Ace was (finally) starting to slow down and get a bit tired. She said we'd probably do it next time and before then school similr kinds of questions in the arena.
I wish we had someone on the ground to get pictures and/or video, but we'll be going to Fair Hill's starter trial next week (May 8th) and competing novice as a warm up for the rest of the season. Hopefully they'll have a photographer there! If all goes well at the starter we'll bump up to training and start racking up our qualifying rounds for the training three-day in October! Hell, at the rate we're going I might run a prelim at the very end of the year!
