In the Life of a Texas Eventer 2

 Today I had a group lesson with some of my amazing barn friends! I have my own beuitful big barn and its right in my backyard, but we go out to my trainers place for lessons. So today our group lesson was consiting of grids, we warmed up by doing my trainers favortie warm up thing. Extended trot poles. Most people would use them this far apart as canter poles, but my trainer loves that because it helps them open up and lengthen their stride. And then we did bounces which for those of you who dont know what they are. Its where there is no "stride" between the fences which causes the horse to as soon as they land to take off right again. Its a really good workout for your horse. So we did 6 of them in a row and then we did a bounce to a oxar one stride to another oxar. Again for those of you who don't know what an oxar is, Its a jump but has another jump directly behind it making almost something like this "=" (minus the quotation marks) Sox was fairly good, one thing that my trainer is trying to get us to work on is getting him to find his distnace, she wants me to back off and not touch him and let him hit the fence or get a bad striding to it so he can figure out where his spot to take off is. And then after a really good line, we moved to a verticle to a double. It was a little 2'6 fence, then a bend to a skinny black barrel to a short one stride (as it was going down hill) to another black barrel with a pole on top fence. And then we did it backwards (of course after hitting it down a couple times, as he had a very hard time figuring out his distances) In this case we had to really push for the one stride as we were doing the line backwards, and uphill which made it a really long spot to the vertical. we finally found got it good. And ended with a little trail ride with my friends!

Tommorow i am going somewere (dont want to say where) because of sox's health. We need to take him to an emergency clinic to get exrays of his shoulders. He has been really stiff lately and seem to be in quite a bit of paint, which makes him jump funny and him hold himself weird over the fences, throwing out his back. He is in quite  a bit of paint after laying down for a long time, as he is really stiff then. So we finalyl decided it was time to figure out what was wrong. Normally he just works out of it and is competely fine after that! And on days where its really bad he gets bute (like an advil for humans). So tommorow we are making the fairly short trip to go see whats wrong!

ANd then we went swimming with all of my barn friends and had a blast! the lifeguards ended up playing sharks and menos with us, and i almost hit my head on the diving board doing a front flip!