Aside from the crazy amount of driving, the CDE was a lot of fun. Attendees were Cyndie, Rachel, Skyler, June, me and Romeo a 6 year old Gypsy stallion belonging to Villa Vanners.
I was the navigator/groom so I was in charge of making sure Romeo was clean and well fed. Let me tell you, he has A LOT of hair. I scrubbed on him for several hours on Thursday but I was back at the barn at 6:15 on Saturday to get him cleaned up for dressage.
So we were harnessing him for dressage and something just wasn't right. Romeo is normally a really, really great guy to work with so he wasn't being bad, but he was just voicing his opinion about a few things he normally never even swishes his tail over. None of us had seen him like this before and we never could figure out what had him in a tiz, so unfortunately Rachel wasn't able to put in a consistent dressage test and was in 4th place after dressage and cones. As grumpy as he was, 4th wasn't a bad place to be sitting in going into the marathon.
On marathon day Romeo was back to his charming self and off we went. Rachel and I struggled the whole marathon on where we were supposed to be going and ended up in someone's back yard during section A. We turned around and cantered a good bit of the way through the rest of that section to make up time. Romeo has a wonderfully balanced and smooth canter and we made the section A times with ease despite the detour.
I had noticed how nice and forward Romeo walked while I was leading him around on Friday and he had no issues with the walk section times either. I believe he came in around 10:03 and I kept panicing thinking I had read the times wrong and it was supposed to be 10min instead of 12 because he did it so easily. His pulse, respiration and temps were great-80 and 102! He didn't even look winded. At the follow up check the vet said he was barely breathing...like almost sleeping. And we were worried about his conditioning...
Section E was also fun and we had no problems with the hazards or the times.
We ended up in 3rd place overall due to an entry being eliminated. Should that entry see this post, I hope to see you all at another CDE in the future. Your guy is very handsome and deserves the opportunity to become the fun CDE horse that he could be.
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