Dressage To Music
I have decided to have a go at dressage to music. I’ve never done this before and I don’t actually know anyone who has, but I’ve watched the local winter regional final and read up on it and I’m going to have a go. Unfortunately they are all run in 20×60 arenas (unless the organiser has a good reason not to) and we only have a 25×45 so this meant hiring somewhere to come up with a test of the required 4 minutes 15 seconds. So I coughed up £30 for the big arena at Myerscough and turned up at 8am Sunday morning.
The reason for the stupidly early start was
a) so I could get it over with and Jad could still have a full day in the field and
b) so Nick could go straight off on one of his all day bike rides.
Myerscough’s arena is actually nowhere near 20×60, it’s more like 40×80 or something. It’s massive anyway. So, we had to resort to a high tech method of measuring out the size of arena needed. This is why any visitors to the arena would have seen busy with some baling string cut to 10m and 12m lengths and pieces of A5 paper with the letters written on. You may mock, but it worked.
Once Jad had calmed down enough to school (apparently seeing arena that size with nothing in it is scary) I rode through the test that I had carefully prepared. OK, make that thrown together in 10 minutes the night before. Anyway, it was a good minute too long. So we changed it around a bit – still a minute too long. We cut huge chunks out – 10 seconds too short. So I threw in a rein back and it was sorted.
We rode it a couple of times so Nick could video it and home we went*. All we need now is music!
* In Nick’s case via 70 hilly miles in the rain.