One of the perks of having a good buddy that is a pro equestrian, is getting no holes barred yearly evaluations of your beloved ponykins.  I wasn’t sure what she would originally think of Mr. Simon pants because she is not always a super huge fan of Thoroughbreds.  It’s not that they are bad horses, but she’s surrounded by the top hunter/jumper horses in the world and that’s pretty much warmblood nation.  Even us OTTB aficionados can admit there are a lot of lame, strung out and brain fried Thoroughbreds out there that can give the good ones a little bit of a bad rap (true of all breeds really).  Stereotypes do like to get blown out of proportion!

So imagine my surprise last year when she sat on Simon and was like, “Oh he’s so cool!  I love him!”  Yay!  This year I was even more curious to hear her opinion.  Is he as sound as I think he is?  Has all this hard work been worth it?

The overall consensus in her opinion is that he’s still super cool and awesome.  Yay!

She immediately felt a weakness in the right hind, but not an unsoundness.  He is stronger than last year and a lot less green.  I think the exact quote was, “Last year we had a weak green horse with no muscle and this year we have a stronger horse with some weaknesses.”  That’s what I feel like too.

She also loved my new barn and thought my trainer was doing a really good job with him.  Also sentiments I feel, but it’s nice to have your plan confirmed by someone in the industry that you trust a lot.

On Friday she jumped him around a bit and did a little work on some changes.  She got about 2-3 clean changes, but not all of them.  That seems similar to the reports I get from my trainer when she does training rides, and makes me feel a bit better as to why I haven’t gotten a clean change on him yet.  They’re hard for him, and I don’t have all the tools in my toolbox that the pros do.

For jumping we kept everything pretty little and she worked on doing some technical and controlled rollbacks and bending lines and turns. This is Simon’s favorite kind of work, so he pretty much hopped over everything with no trouble.

Towards the end she did a tightish rollback with him, and although he was a little ‘Left, we’re turning left?!’ at first they got the hang of it quickly.

Basically he was a really good boy and she enjoyed riding him.  Immediately after she hopped off she was all, “Jumpers!  You have to do him in the jumpers!”

To which my trainer was politely like, “We need to work on Mommy some before we can do the jumpers…”

Truer words have not been spoken, but who knows one day!  We came back out the day after to work on flat, but I’ll save that for another post.  The rain is just continuing on here in buckets, so it may be a while before I can really get back out to the barn and get back to it.

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