Dom schramm clinic

A few weeks after our wonderful horse trial Roan and I had the opportunity to clinic with the awesomely Australian eventer Dom Schramm. Seeing as our barn hosted him, I was chucked into the only group that had an opening as we tried to accommodate everyone else before we picked our levels. The class was 3'. While Roanie and I have jumped plenty of fences at that height we had never jumped a full course at that height range. To complicate the course of large fences further, the clinic was being held in the covered dressage arena due to disagreeable weather. I was very nervous to be riding in front of so many auditors in a clinic height a little out of my comfort zone and Roanie definitely picked up on it. We didn't spend much time warming up and Dom went straight to canter adjustability.... Which you all know how adjustable Roanies canter is....  Adding canter strides in between fences is so hard for me and Roanie you may as well ask us to do a somersault in midair over the fence. We gave it our best and took our criticism well.

From there we worked on lead changes over fences, which everyone breezed right through, then Dom started putting fences up, then he put them up some more, and then up again. They just kept getting bigger and bigger which seemed to make the arena smaller and smaller. Despite the fact that I was so nervous I think I forgot to breathe for the first half of the course, Roanie took care of me and jumped everything beautifully. We did have trouble with one fence rolling back off to the left. It was a big airy vertical and we just couldn't keep our balance to. But, we worked through it and I learned that I sometimes have to sacrifice perfect balance for enough forward to keep a good quality canter.

This was the vertical that was so challenging! Finally got it though :) 

It's always such a fun learning experience riding with Dom. He definitely pushed me way outside of my comfort zone and really proved to me that the bigger fences are no issue for us. A huge thank you to him and Jimmie for coming all the way down to NC for one day to do a clinic with us!