Thursday 10 December 2009

1st Blog Post! 2009 Round Up


Before we get all excited about 2010, here's a quick round up of 2009. :)

January- Team Hopalong were just starting out their competitive "career" with some unaffiliated dressage and SJ. Rosettes aplenty with the SJ... not so much with the dressage! ;)

February- We took part in two of Les Smith's Arena Events at Dabbs (now Howe Country
Centre) and had fun, not fast enough for a placing at the 1st and not clear enough at the 2nd! :p

March- Team Hopalong had their first taste of XC up at Strathearn Eventing with Sarah H
oulden, a great day and we covered almost every possible type of XC fence!

April- We took part in our first competitive XC outing at Montrave HT, the giddy heights of 75cm! ;) A lovely clear round, but 1min over the optimum time gave us 6th place! :) A trip to Craigie HT was next and having realised we could jump, we kicked on and came home under the optimum time! 2nd place after a long wait for results, our support crew/'tog was not convinced the hanging around was worth it, but we were! :)

May- We took part in the first of a number of BE training days with David Gatherer. This one was at Scone and we had a ball getting to go round and play over the Intro fences, maybe the mad notion of doing a BE competitively wasn't such a mad one after all?! We also did the Doune pick-a-fence XC where we were able to test ourselves over bigger fences but with a "get out" option! Only one "get out" option required at the horrid skinny pimple, but great round the rest.

June- Another BE training day, this time at Oatridge, this time being brave enough to jump some of the PN fences and even a few Novice! :D


July- The third of our BE training days at Hopetoun, this time mostly jumping the PN fences (and a couple of their kinder Novice fences!), camera man enjoyed the below moment but pleased to say we stayed together and did it with a bit more
style the next time as shown in 2nd photo! ;)


















We had a bu
sy month, meeting up with Anna and Indie for a ride along the beach at Dunbar, doing some outdoors dressage and SJ at North Lammermuir's show (and earning our first dressage rosette, 3rd!) and then completing our first ODE at Dalmeny unaff 90cm event, it was very wet and soggy, but we came away with 5th place. :)

August- Our first BE! We headed off to Strathallan Intro and although the less said about the dressage the better (Heidi found it all very exciting!), we completed with a double clear to pull us up to mid-table. We then entered Scone Intro a couple of weeks later and (with a slightly improved dressage!) with another double clear came 4th, absolutely thrilled! (Bob disappointed to find out that 4th in an Intro doesn't pay prize money though!)

September- A trip back to Craigie to take on the 90cm course saw us finishing 4th with a clear round including a fair number of ditches on course, very happy! We were very excited to head down to Hendersyde Park for a lesson with Ian Stark courtesy of Horse magazine and had a fantastic day. We then finished up the month with our last ODE of the season at Dalkeith, Heidi enjoying being back at her original home and coming third in the open (1m) class.

















October- Our last XC outings of the year were at Gleneagles and Kinnaird for their unaff HTs. We had lovely clear rounds at both, but were too fast at Gleneagles and were unlucky at Kinnaird where the fence judge managed to miss us flying over one of the fences (which we most definitely DID jump!) and so were eliminated. :( Still, Heidi brilliant and jumped all the skinnies and ditches brilliantly so a great end to the season, if not on paper!


November- Our first attempt at BSJA at the SNEC Intro show saw us come 3rd in the 80cm class and 6th in the 90cm with two double clears, very clever pony! Attempted another couple of prelim dressage tests and even came home with a 6th place in one of them, very surprised!

December- A busy month with work, so a bit of chill out time for Team Hopalong and a chance to train and plot our plans for 2010...! :)

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