Eventing BINGO

I literally had no idea what I was going to post about today - life has been pretty boring this past week, horse-wise - and I was SO GLAD to see all of the EVENTING BINGO posts popping up when I logged in today; I completely forgot about Emma's awesome contest!  So, here is my contribution/entry.  I was assigned cards C and M.

This post comes from the second vertical row of Card M.  

• Cleared the standards
• Got lost in the woods
• Finished last place
• Mud EVERYWHERE
• Passed another horse XC

It was a cold and rainy day.  Despite my best attempts to bathe, groom, and show-sheen the crap out of Leo the night before the mini event, he had other plans involving his personal hygiene.  As in, when I arrived at the barn at the glorious hour of 4:30 AM, he was completely and totally covered in mud.  Like, there was mud EVERYWHERE.  How does a horse get mud inside of their ears?!  Leo, being the chromed out beast that he is, was looking decidedly brown.  Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to give him another bath before we had to leave for the show, so I had to make do with bath-in-a-bottle once we got there which kind of worked.  Sort of.  

And of course, his neatly pulled mane EXPLODED overnight.

Despite Leo's determination to win the prize of least-clean horse on the planet, we arrived at the show on time and made it through our dressage test without little incident.  It wasn't great, it wasn't terrible, it just was.  We moved on to stadium feeling pretty confident about ourselves.  A little too confident, now that I think about it.  Between dressage and stadium, Leo decided that he wanted to move up a level or seven - maybe the simple circles of the BN dressage test were boring, or maybe he saw the massive XC jumps on our way to stadium and got inspired.  Whatever the reasoning, homeboy was LIT UP when it was our turn to enter the ring.

Zooooooooom

Leo jumped all of the jumps.  He also cleared the standards approximately 8/9 times.  Possibly because he was traveling at roughly the pace of a speeding bullet.  Whatever.  We finished with a clear round, and made our way to the start box for XC with only a few several time penalties for our enthusiastic stadium performance.

as we have never done XC, I have no photos, but this one is nice.

Leo's enthusiasm for life was not diminished by the trek to the start box.  He was, in fact, raring to go when we arrived.  Waiting was kind of hard, and when it was finally our turn to go he took off so quickly that I had no time to pay attention to where we were actually going; after the first jump he was running so fast I didn't even notice that we were lost in the woods until I realized that the only jumps in sight were way, way too big to be BN.  

Thankfully, at that point homeboy had somewhat worn himself down, and as we turned around to find our way back it was at a much more reasonable pace.  Still, once we were back on track, we somehow managed to pass another horse, so maybe the pace wasn't actually as reasonable as I believed.  

Unfortunately, we racked up quite a few more time penalties after our hurried XC run, and ended up finishing in last place.  

At least we jumped all the jumps though, right?