So Worth the Trip

Let's just say that Lady would be ecstatic if someone came up with a sport that consisted of three days of cross-country!  The Advanced course at Chatt Hills was 3540m long with an optimum time of 6 minutes 13 seconds (riding at 570 meters per minute).  It started off with a series of quick and technical turning combinations, and then opened up for a chance to really gallop.  I went out to re-walk a number of the combinations a few times because there were a lot of very skinny fences set on bending lines.  As usual, after I got Lady out into the warm-up any worries started to fade away...and they disappeared completely as she burst out of the start box and over the first fence.

Here are a few pictures of the course that I took.  My computer doesn't want to cooperate so I cannot seem to rotate a few of them, so I apologize for the sideways shots! 

Fences 10 and 11...big angled tables one stride apart.

That brush was as tall as me!

The front side of the big brush at fence 6.

The Sunken Road

Jump, one stride, down, one stride, up, bounce, jump.

Sorry it's sideways but my computer is being a pain...the is 4B.

Another sideways view of 4AB.



And a sideways view of 15A, and you can barely see the flags for the drop to the chevrons (BCD).



15BCD

15ABCD from the back side...look at that drop!

 Lady ate up the course, and absolutely loved the turns and the skinny questions.  The course through to fence 15ABCD (the Bit of Britain bank complex) was so rapid-fire that I didn't bother checking how I was on time until after the sunken road at 21ABCD.  With 4 fly fences to go before the finish flags, I glanced down and saw that I still had a minute to go!  I couldn't believe it!  I let Lady reach out into a real gallop, and made it over the last few big tables to cross the finish flags just 1 second over the optimum time!  And Lady wanted to keep galloping through the flags and go around again...I love that horse.

I want to take a second to thank everyone for the texts and messages today.  It's really awesome knowing that I have a cheering section back home!

Eventing Nation has video of the entire Advanced division over bits and pieces of the entire course if you're interested in seeing how it rode.  They only caught me jumping over fence 17...one of the "small" tables heading to the final loop of the course.

Thanks for reading, and think clean thoughts for Lady and I around noon tomorrow...that's when we'll be doing the final phase, stadium jumping.