Today I took Scottie to our first ever dressage show inside. I’m unsure how many times Scottie has been in an indoor arena, but before today he had only every been in the one with me (which happens to be the one we were in today) and he wasn’t too relaxed in there then.
However, I didn’t think the indoor arena would be a huge issue and was sure Scottie would do some lovely work.
We arrived and Scottie warmed up in the outdoor arena beautifully. He took a little while to completely relax in the busy warm up ring, but he produced some really nice work in there. So I had my fingers crossed for this attitude to continue inside.
It turns out indoor arenas can be quite scary!
It was gorgeous, strong sunshine for our first test, Prelim 13. So when we entered the indoor arena there were bright squares of light on the floor. I was surprised at how bright they were but I didn’t really think it would be an issue. Scottie immediately took a dislike to the white dressage boards. This was annoying as he hasn’t had a problem with them at other shows. But we got a lap of the arena past all of the scary boards before the bell rang.
This test was fine. He was really quite tense throughout the whole test and spooked a few times, one of which was during our first canter and despite getting the canter back quite quickly, we spooked again and completely lost it and carried on down the long side in a rather panicked trot.
Luckily one of the next moves was walk and then free walk across the diagonal. This helped Scottie to find his brain and the rest of the test was nice, with a good canter, but still quite tense.
Despite Scottie’s tension, we scored mainly 6.5s with a few 6s and a 5 and two 3s for spooky (slightly missed) movements. Which combined with fair collective marks we scored a really respectable 59.42%! We also didn’t come last!
“When relaxed and listening some pleasing moments.”
Our Collectives were:
Rhythm: 6.5 (13)
Suppleness: 5.5 (11)
Contact: 6.5 (13)
Rider’s Position: 6 (12)
Rider’s Results: 6 (12)
After realising there were no monsters in the indoor school and the sun disappeared behind a cloud, our second test, Prelim 18, was lovely. Scottie was still a tiny bit tense, but he was forward and mostly on the bit and fairly round. In fact the only real errors in this test were my steering!
In this test we scored mostly 7s and 6.5s with the odd 6, giving us an overall score of 65.57% and just a couple outside the rosettes!
“Charming horse showing pleasing rhythm in the paces.”
Our Collectives were:
Rhythm: 7 (14)
Suppleness: 6.5 (13)
Contact: 6.5 (13)
Rider’s Position: 6.5 (13)
Rider’s Effectiveness: 6.5 (13)
I’m really pleased with how Scottie went today. We got our second highest ever Prelim score and beat both our previous scores for both these tests. Scottie was also a super star in the warm up ring and reached down to seek the contact in both of our tests in canter! Although we didn’t get our best scores, we certainly rode our best test!
Credit Bluemoon Photography
You can watch both our tests below, although my phone really struggled to catch our first test so its quite blurry!
Prelim 13
Prelim 18
Last Updated on 14/01/2022
Well done! You did a great job 🙂