What My First 4* Event Taught Me - #246

Today, we cannot really talk about anything else than the fact that I went for a start for the first time in my life and Echo's life for that matter.

Last week, there were some really cool stuff.

There were some less cool stuff.

to be honest, as it is when we debut at a new level most of the time.

So yeah, we're just going to talk you guys through the whole experience.

Some of you are probably following me on Instagram already, and you'll have a hint, you'll have an idea of how this week kind of developed.

But for those of you who didn't follow me on Instagram, to make a very long story short, we basically started out with dressage.

And I practiced really, really hard to learn flying changes the last three weeks.

Before that, we hadn't really done much of that.

So we got a sharp deadline and we practiced very hard to do flying changes.

With the result of that, Echo did jump a flying change every here and there.

Not necessarily where they were supposed to be in the test.

And he also added some special effects to it.

And he also decided to spook in a corner.

So yeah, to say the least, we got slaughtered by the judges.

But hey, we got through it.

We got to show jumping.

And I got to say, I kind of was quite nervous.

And we're going to get to that throughout this episode.

But I got to say, to step into the ring and just to be in the warm up with people like Imrid Klimke...

A lot of the Lidekerke, and not on their young horses.

It's one thing when you kind of are next to them and they're on their young experienced horses.

But when they are on their top horses, the whole Swedish team were there with their top horses they're going to bring to the world championship in Aachen.

And all of a sudden you're in the middle of all of that with your eight-year-old horse doing all of this for the first time.

And I got to say...