My wife gave me permission to cheat on her during the holidays.
In fact, she facilitated it.
You see, before Ashley became my wife on July 23, 2020, she was my trainer for learning to ride horses. I took my first lesson with Ashley on May 30, 2015, and immediately fell in love with eventing on OTTBs. A few years later, I fell in love with her.
Ashley has remained my trainer, and, in some ways, the trainer-student relationship can be trickier than husband-wife. For Christmas and Hanukkah, Ashley arranged for me to take dressage lessons with other trainers.
As I’ve started to move up the eventing levels, my Achilles’ heel has been dressage. That’s the first discipline in eventing based on the movement and rhythm of the horse on the flat that sets a rider’s initial score. After dressage, penalties can be accumulated for jumping or time faults in the cross country and stadium jumping phases.
I’ve placed in the ribbons in three of my last four events, even while moving up from the Beginner Novice level where the jumps are at a maximum height of 2-feet-7 to the Novice level of 2-feet-11. I’ve always been at or near the bottom of the standings after dressage. 11th of 16, 11th of 18, and 10th of 11. However, after clean jumping rounds in cross country and stadium jumping, I’ve improved those placings to 7th of 16, 6th of 18, and 5th of 11.
“His jumping has progressed so much, and dressage is what’s keeping him out of the top placings,” Ashley wrote when she reached out to four different trainers in the area. “He is finishing on his dressage score; it’s just a bad dressage score.”
