American Eventing Championship - Atlanta, Georgia (pt.4)

Our "cozy" room

I'm trying to get through this post that has turned into a Telemundo novela.  Who would have thought writing about a horse show could be so difficult?


Ok, the end of part three had the five of us in our "COZY" room getting ready for bed on Thursday night.  Well Friday morning came early.  5am, to be exact.  The horses had to be fed by 7am, and the girls had to be tacted up and ready to ride by 9am and 10am respectively.  I'm still confused why I had to be up so early, but no one asked me ;op 


and. . . .
why these crazy horse-girls have to participate in a sport that starts before the day does is beyond me, but here we were pulling into the show grounds as the sun was coming up.


The first day of competition was Dressage, the method of training a horse to perform maneuvers in response to the rider's body signals, which traditionally is Amanda's and Astro's strongest area.  Although they performed well and even scored fairly well, those of us watching did not feel that A&A's score reflected their performance.  


After seeing the scores of other rider with us, we knew for certain that either the judges had ignored the advice of the their seeing-eye dogs or they hadn't watch the same performances we had.  What can you do though?  The girls were proud to be here and I was proud for them.


We hung around the rest of the afternoon watching the other events going on around the grounds and taking care of the horses.  It was quite an adventure seeing some of the higher level horse and rider combos running cross country.  


Picture if you will, a horse running up to an obstacle the size of a Land Rover (just so happened to be the sponsor of the event), leaping it into water immediately followed by another gi-monsterous [aka HUGE] obstacle, oh and being timed to complete this course in a certain amount of time while not running too fast or too slow!?!  Uh huh, yea, NO THANKS.  


This always scares me when Amanda & Astro run, and with people I didn't know it wasn't much different so I ended up napping on the hill over-looking the cross country course while the girls watched.  

Cross Country ended up being the second event for the girls, which went a lot better for both of them. They both ran clear rounds, meaning they didn't have any stops at the obstacles and no time penalties.  Again though we had to be up at 5am.  Crazy-horse girls!!!