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I am now blogging directly on my website. Please follow this link to read more about the Ashley Leith Equestrian Team: www.ashleyleithequestrian.com

Summer With The Horses

After Bromont, Jet took it easy for a few weeks. I like to give the horses a little R&R after big shows. The six weeks before an FEI show is very busy and the horses have a lot of mental as well as physical responsibility. It is good for them to have a break once or twice a year to just hang out with their friends in the field and be horses.

Of course, I also had an agenda while Jet was resting. First, we got him on a new supplement called E3Live. This is a blue green algae that is given to him daily in liquid form. It is 97% absorbable and it is great stuff! I have started taking the human form myself. In horses and in humans it aids in regeneration after physical exertion, and it also helps with mental clarity and focus. The product was brought to the equine industry by farrier Wayne Blevins after he started taking it himself and saw great results. After Wayne started using it on horses, he recorded amazing growth and recovery in horse's hooves. As soon as I learned about some of his results, I decided that this was the supplement for Jet! My two top priorities this summer for Jet are to get a better hoof on him and to get him stronger through his topline so that he can handle the all three days of a three day competition. You can find out more about E3Live by clicking on the link on my website.

Along with the new supplement, Jet has been on a "topline program." This includes bulking his weight up so that he has more meat on his bones that can be converted to muscle, putting him on an acupuncture program to keep the flow of his systems even, and taking him once a week to do the aqua tread at Kendalwood Farm. If you have been reading my blog for awhile, you will remember that Doc did this regularly, especially after he injured the cartilage in his right front knee. Jet is doing beautifully with the aqua tread. It is great for coordination, topline strength and cardio. Tara and P.J., who own Kendalwood Farm, are true masters of their machine and it is a lot of fun to watch them take Jet through his 25 minute workout.

Monte has been going well at the preliminary level and continues to mature. He has a lovely temperament and I enjoy working with him. We competed at the Maryland Horse Trials last weekend and we have the NJ Horse Trials and Fair Hill coming up. At the end of August both Monte and Jet will go to "Princeton Show Jumping" at Hunter Farms.

In other farm news, we got new sand footing for the outdoor ring, which is WONDERFUL! However, I overestimated how much we would need. The ring went from being rock hard to way too deep in places. After some brainstorming, I decided to use the front end loader to move some of the sand into the indoor, so that the indoor would have some new footing too. This has been quite a project. I was out there this morning working on it some more. Unfortunately, I got a little too much wet sand in the bucket, and went over a bump that was a little too big. Here is a photo of the result! After I emptied the bucket, I was able to get the tractor "back on all four feet." Ah, farm life!

Bromont CCI*** 2010

Bromont CCI*** this year was a qualifier for the World Equestrian Games that will take place in Lexington, Kentucky this fall. The U.S. had several riders competing who were hoping to use this event to secure a spot on the WEG short list summer eventing squad that has two spots remaining. Mark Phillips, the U.S. Chef D'Equipe, as well as many of the U.S. selectors were wandering around all weekend watching us go. Some of the U.S. riders in contention for the two training spots were Will Coleman, Heidi White, Kim Severson, John Williams, and Buck Davidson. Other countries also had riders trying to qualify for the WEGs, including Ronald Zabala from Ecuador and Rebecca Howard and Jessica Phoenix from Canada. On the other end of the spectrum, this was Jet's first CCI***. Nevertheless, I know how consistent my boy is and my goal for Jet this weekend was to go out with a fire in my belly and have us placed in the ribbons on Sunday before show jumping. Show jumping has been an achilles heel this spring and I didn't want to promise myself anything in that phase.

Jet was the best I could have asked for right now in Friday's dressage test, scoring a 59.2 with our one lead change still not confirmed and the rest of the test steady and appropriate but not yet too flashy.

On cross country my thoughts were to give Jet a confidence building ride and to try to add nothing to our dressage score. On cross country day, Jet was the clever little spright that he is. This is his best phase. He was a little surprised by a few things, but he adjusted immediately. Corner jumps caused the most trouble on the course, including eliminating Heidi White and Buck Davidson. The first corner was jump 5B, which also was the jump that caused the most trouble all day. The combination was a big table (5A) with a four stride or five stride line to a decent sized corner (5B). What I thought made the combination difficult was that the straight route had us jumping directly at a big, bushy tree, and I wondered if that would back the horses off. What other riders worried about was the size of the table. I found that the line rode in a flowing four, but other riders who had trouble didn't get as deep to the corner and it opened the door for an early runout.

Over the whole course Jet felt well within himself and he was very proud of himself at the end. At halfway, I was down on the clock so I opened up a little more for the back half of the course. There had been storms at Bromont and the footing was heavy in places. Although I went as fast as I could, I didn't make my goal of making the time and we came in seven seconds slow on the clock. I was depressed about it until later that afternoon. When Jet was between icings I went over to look at the scores. To my amazement, out of the thirty horses in the CCI***, only one horse had made time and Jet had the second best xc round of the day! We had added only 2.8 faults to our dressage and were sitting in fifth place. We were seated in the ribbons going into show jumping on Sunday!

Perhaps, though, I should have also created a more concrete goal for Sunday. After passing the second vet inspection Sunday morning, we went on to have a very disappointing show jumping round. We took eight rails down. Although Jet felt very fit and happy in his energy level on stadium day, he had pulled a shoe somewhere on course on Saturday (I never felt him do it, so I don't know where it happened) and he was quite sore on that foot. None of the downed rails were bad mistakes, Jet just kept tipping them. We dropped to 14th.

Jet only moved up to advanced this spring and he is still gaining muscle at this level. We are going to go back to the drawing board this summer and do a huge amount of body building work, because the cardio is easy for him. I'm sure the foot was an issue on Sunday, but having a topline that can handle three hard days in a row is critical too, and he obviously doesn't have that yet. Our next CCI*** will be at Fair Hill International in Maryland in October, and for that event, after a summer of show jumping, my goal will be to finish the weekend in the top six.

On Track

We are on track to leave tomorrow morning. Jet looks great. I am not sure if I will have internet in Canada. The Bromont website is http://www.bromont3dayevent.com/english_home.htm. They will have updated results. A bientot!

Preparation

We are five days from leaving for Bromont. The past two weeks I have had Jet at Bruce Davidson's Chesterland Farm in Unionville, PA. Unionville is still a small slice of heaven if you are a horse person. There are thousands of acres of interconnected farms, rolling hills, and lush green grass. The clover and honeysuckle are almost intoxicating. It is nice to know that a place like that still exists, and it is due to the very hard work of a small group of landowners who banded together to keep development out.

Jet is happy there. He started as a racehorse and he finds comfort in a routine of hard work. He is fit and muscular and the goal for the next five days is to maintain what we have.

Preparing for a major three day is a big endeavor. There are the logistics of entry forms and working through the national federation to gain permission to compete abroad. There are passports and health certificates and hotel reservations. There is the matter of coordinating help at the farms in Pennsylvania and Florida and help at the event, airplane tickets in this case, and more hotel reservations. Then plans change slightly and some things need to be reshuffled. There is also the necessity for Jet's "team" to see him in perfect timing with his pending schedule. The vet comes two weeks before leaving to go over him and make sure I am not missing any red flags in terms of his well being. The farrier comes in the same time frame so that the shoes are new, but not so new as to risk making him foot sore. The chiropractor and massage therapist have seen him several times this past month to aid in keeping him injury free as his fitness and work load increase. Jet's feed increases during this time frame and so does his risk of colicing or developing ulcers. He is on two types of ulcer prevention medicine daily. He is in a stall more to rest and to keep him from using his newfound fitness to hurt himself in the field, so I have to make sure he is eating his hay (a difficult feat for a thoroughbred) and not getting dehydrated in this heat. My own routine with Jet has intensified as well. He gets ridden seven days a week. Every day I have to give 100% during the hour or more that I am on his back, and so does he.

I have been through this process many times getting ready for three day events. The bigger the event, the more intense the process is. I also know that there are a hundred different things that can keep you from competing. It not only takes the skills of competing to get through a three day event, but good management skills as well. It also takes luck, as we saw when we got to Rolex four star last spring. At that event, perhaps luck was against us.

I was up at 5:30 am and it is now 6:25. It is going to be hot today, so I am leaving now to make the hour drive to Unionville to get Jet out on those hills early, before the heat of the day. Sitting on him I will feel a refined machine underneath me. We will do cardiovascular work first and then go right into working on our skills. Today it is going to be flying changes. We have five days to go, and I need to make sure that each one is a day like any other.

Mike McNally Photography

When we were at The Fork in April I rented a golf cart for the first time ever. The weekend there becomes very long when you have to walk or mountain bike back and forth between stabling and the competition area every day. Having been a pedestrian plenty of times, I made sure that with my golf cart I picked up every person I could who was on foot. A few weeks ago at Jersey Fresh I was approached by a couple. The husband was Mike McNally the photographer. It turned out I had picked his wife up not once but twice as I buzzed along. Mike was so gracious, he had made many beautiful prints of Jet on cross country. As he said, "It pays to pick up the right people." After Jersey Fresh I emailed him about using his images on my website and on Facebook. He was great to work with and I am currently in the process of getting all of the pictures up. Please check out his work! He can be reached at mikejmcnally@aol.com.

Jersey Fresh CIC*** Cross Country Pictures of Jet

Here are two pictures of Jet on cross country on Saturday. One was featured on the Chronicle of the Horse website. The other was taken by a photographer working for the ReRun adoption organization. This non-profit thoroughbred adoption program tries to give horses coming from the race track a second career. Jet raced until he was five and we bought him off the track. Jet's photos are going to be featured on their website, which is www.rerun.org.