After a week of beautiful weather, a storm system moved in Saturday morning. I decided to try to ride, as Hans really needs the experience in the ring, and so far the footing was holding up despite the rain.
He was sharp but eventually settled in pretty well in the larger warmup ring despite the rain, but that changed when we moved to the smaller warmup attached to our show arena 10 minutes out from my ride time. He was getting over reactive to outside stimuli as well as my aids, and I didn’t have a great feeling. Jeremy was fantastic at “talking me off the ledge”, and I decided to try to ride. He had a huge spook going around the outside of the ring, and it went downhill from there. He was just overwhelmed, and there was no point in continuing. I excused myself, and took him back to the barn. I was disappointed, but definitely felt that I had made the right choice. He needs to build confidence, and it was just not our day.
