The 2017 Anoka County Fair was
going to be my best fair yet. Vegas and me were working so well together, in
pleasure and games. He was ready to do his best and so was I….until about 1
hour before the show started. This blog post is all about how the fair went for
my horses and me, how I dealt with it, and how it came together.
Monday night the horses arrived and
they were all ready for the show. They were settled in their stalls and fed for
the night. I went to bed. The next morning I got Keeno out of his stall and
lunged him to get his energy out. Then I bathed him and put him in his stall to
eat. Next I got Vegas out and started bathing him. I was washing his front leg
when I noticed it was really swollen. I immediately knew he was hurt and could
not be ridden. Oh, no! What now? I had a guaranteed state trip with the Dan Patch
Youth Leadership Award but needed to ride a horse and get blue ribbons in order
to compete at state. Now what should I do?
I had one hour to get my back-up
horse to the fair and ready to show. The only horse I thought of was Winchester,
my three-year-old quarter horse whom I bought last fall to train. With only one
hour, the clock was ticking. Here is how it went. I ran to get our pick-up truck
while Steve Falkers (Vegas’ owner) worked on finding a trailer and hitch to
use. We ended up borrowing one family’s hitch and another’s trailer. Steve
drove to my house to pick up Winchester. I still had to show my training horse,
Keeno, though. While I was showing Keeno, Winchester arrived and I had one
class to get him ready.
Thanks to the best support group
ever—when I came out of the arena with Keeno, Winchester was already getting
clipped. I got the show halter on and started training him to square and pivot.
I had about 10 minutes.
I walked him into the Showmanship Class
and showed as hard as I ever had before. It didn’t go as planned but I never
gave up showing, even when things didn’t go so well. I dealt with all of this
like it was just another day. I told myself “just because things aren’t going as planned doesn’t mean it
won’t be fun”. It is hard not to panic in a tough situation like this but I
told myself: this is all fun, not a competition. It turned out alright in the
end.
A little background: Now you need
to understand that my only intention that I had for Winchester this year was
for roping. I never worked on barrels and never even thought about slowing him
down! But now what?
I have a horse at the fair that has
not done any of this before. Well, all I heard was Vegas in my ear yelling at
me for giving up. So I never gave up. I went in the show pen and rode
Winchester like I would have ridden Vegas. Each time I walked through the gate
I did two things.
·
The first thing I did was thanked the Lord that
I had a horse to ride.
·
The second thing was telling myself how much fun
I was going to have.
I did this the whole three days of the horse show—every single
time. Every time I entered the arena, Winchester stepped up to the plate and performed
like a champion. We placed higher than 3rd blue in all the pleasure
events and received blue ribbons in every game, except poles.
Coming off a really good fair last
year with Vegas when I got all around high point of the county, I felt like a
lot of other 4-H’ers were watching me with high expectations. When Vegas went
down, I was so close to crying, until he gave me “the look”. Vegas has always
given me this face, whenever he wanted to challenge me. For example, when I
first started riding him, he would just stand at the gate and not move with
this expression. When I saw his face, I knew that he wanted me to do the very
best I could do, even if it was on a different horse. That is exactly what I
did! Because of it, Winchester earned himself the 7th State Trip of
Anoka County, which I didn’t need to accept because I had a trip with Dan Patch.
This fair will stand out to me not because I did well and not because I had the
best situation coming in, but because I made a bad situation into a good one. I
made the best better.
