Ditches don’t have hot tamales (June Schooling HT XC)

After my genius moves out on the stadium course, I was bound and freaking determined I was NOT GOING TO GET LOST on XC. Like, that was my goal. What’s that saying, “aim for the moon, even if you miss you’ll be in the stars” – this is something like “aim for making it to your gd space shuttle, even if you miss, you might make it to Target.”

Spoiler alert: I didn’t get lost! WOOHOO!

I did, however, do the following:

  • Talk through my entire course (I really need to get a Cambox if only for the audio recording)
  • Sit up and ride at the first (big) ditch, getting over it beautifully, only to completely not ride to the second (not even real) ditch and have a stop
  • Convince Iggy that, yes, there was a rollback in this XC course and yes, he was going to do it
  • Gallop the last two jumps completely out of stride because I am a minor adrenaline junkie, I love my pony and it was SO MUCH FUN
So much fun
Image by Grace Waggoner

Essentially, that sums it up. The stop was dumb-dumb-dumb, but entirely my not riding. It was a half coffin, ditch to coop and others had issues there, mostly with the coop, but Iggy could have cared less about that. I honestly think he likes to look in ditches to check for hidden treasure. Like, “Oh, a ditch, I wonder if someone hid some hot tamales in here for me!”

Needless to say, I will be riding every single stride to every single ditch forever now. He can have hot tamales after the finish flags.

Even with my dumb 20, we easily finished inside the time (honestly, without the penalties, we would have been cutting it a little close on speed faults, OOPS) and it was a fantastic experience. Overall, my goal for the weekend was to finish on a number, and that we did! We ended up 11th out of 15, but honestly I could seriously care less about it. It was about getting our first completion together under our belt and that we did!

Next up is camp (!!!) the 6th-10th of July and then off to IEA, assuming we get in. I sent entries in on opening day, so fingers crossed.

Related Posts

5 Comments

Leave a Reply to Teresa Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *