Open horse show

Well, I spent all day at the horse show. This post is likely going to sound negative, so I'll start with the good news. I got a first out of six in Western Pleasure and five out of fifteen in Western Country Pleasure. We started the day with Showmanship. I got 4 out of 5. I'm not sure why we didn't do better. The pattern was very simple, no pivots or backing. The one thing I forgot in my list of typical mistakes is not lining up straight for the judge. We had to walk from cone A to cone B, trot a circle around B, on to c, and set up for the judge. Then walk off. When I came out of the circle and headed for the judge, I had to straighten out a bit. So we lined up but not automatically. Maybe that was enough. I wish I had done better, but I thought Bandit did well, so it was okay. Then we practiced for trail. We practiced the tight turns and the lope off. He was really, really good. We practiced some western pleasure and he was fine. We took a break and stood in the shade while we waited for trail class to start. We were the second to go. We trotted a serpentine, trotted over some poles, into a box, did a 180 turn, trotted out of the box, over some poles, broke to a walk, over a pole and into a chute, backed in the chute. Everything was great at this point. Then we were supposed to lope out of the chute and around to a pole to side pass. Right after I loped off, Bandit raised his head, dropped his shoulder and kicked my spur. Basically he wouldn't lope properly for me. I had no control of him. I grabbed the saddle horn, stopped him, and tried again. He loped a few steps, still totally out of control, and then we did our side pass to finish. Trail is our best class and we've won a lot of firsts. But today, he didn't want to lope for me. This is not a new problem, but he hasn't done it in awhile. It's like he has to test me once in awhile and I always fail the test. We got fourth out of four. At this point, the day was not going well. But I figured, we still had three classes where we might do well. First, there was a western pleasure warm up class. This was not judged and my trainer had me ride him two handed to try to get him right, since we had the trail problem. It was okay until we had to lope the right lead. I asked him to lope, he raised his head and kicked my spur. Then I tried it again and got the same result. This happened about 10 times. He never did lope for me in that class. When the class was done, I went to the warm up area and tried a couple more times; same result. By this time, my trainer came over to ride him, and I was tears. She rode him and made him behave, then she rode him in the next class, western eq. to school him. He was doing better and the next class was western pleasure. It wasn't perfect, but we did well enough to win out of six. In country pleasure, we just trotted, since the lope was not working so well. Bandit was pretty good and we got 5 of 15. So by the end of the day, things got better. But the morning, and afternoon were no fun at all, due to the heat, and me not being able to make Bandit behave. The show was smaller than usual, but country pleasure was a nice sized class. I managed to get 3 PAC points, so that's good. I had fun with the group and my trainer helped me alot, but I get so disappointed with myself. After three years, we are still so inconsistent. Our next show is a small one in two weeks. We have done well there in the past. Each class has an amateur and an open class so we always get a second try. This will be good practice for us.