Crazy Dressage Interpretations

Well, people who have been following since my first post (if any of you exist), you should know that I switched horses fairly recently so I could do a sport I love: eventing. This consists of jumping, cross country, and dressage. Gambit, my horse, however, prefers the jumping and cross country part of it much better. That's not to say I don't either (I definitely like jumping better, I mean, who gets adrenaline from making your horse bounce and do unnatural movements, sitting, and smiling and pretending that you are doing what you should be doing? I don't! But it's necessary, so whatever), but dressage is definitely a main part of eventing.

After today's lesson, I realized dressage was going to be much harder than everyone originally planned. Yes, Gambit is very good at looking pretty, and is fairly good at listening to instructions but he hasn't mastered these things called leads, and so that means no matter how good we look, dressage will be impossible. Well maybe not impossible, but the art form we would be doing would not be called dressage, but more like let's-prance-around-the-arena-and-scare-the-crap-out-of-my-rider-and-make-her-cry-because-I-wanted-to-eat-those-flowers-instead-of-trot-from-k-through-x-to-m. Yes, I'm not over exaggerating. I also would go into much more explanation, but I would bore my few readers of this blog away from this URL for unhappily ever after.

Back to riding, if I were to go into competition right now for dressage, my test would look like this:

This is not what a dressage test should look like.

Well what happened today in the lesson? It wasn't a bad lesson, but I definitely wasn't a star today. Let's say we were supposed to be cantering in a circle, a 30m circle, and picture this: A teenage girl on a huge black horse racing all over the 200m riding ring, speeding around on the wrong lead, changing directions every few seconds, and the trainer telling the poor teenage girl to calmly to toggle her reigns, sit back, think slow thoughts, breathe, and think what she wanted to look like. Ladies and gentlemen, Pauline and Gambit. Yes, because these are things humans love to do when speeding around crazily on an ex racehorse.

Who here knows what dressage is supposed to look like?

I promise, I really can ride, I'll start posting videos soon when I actually remember my video camera has a working battery and can take videos. Well in the meantime, if any of my readers (like five or ten of you) are actually riders, here's a short survival guide about how to relax and have a dressage test go well. Go riding!