Am I ready to move up?

(the answer is "no", by the way)

Alison (my trainer) recently sent out the new lesson schedule for Fall and I noticed that she had moved some people around so that now my Wednesday night lesson is comprised of three girls who are competing at a level above me and, well, me. Gulp. I would say that this caused me some concern. Yep, that would be pretty accurate.

So, this week was my first jumping lesson with the new group and I can say that I spent a lot of the day leading up to the lesson somewhat anxious and tense. It worked out pretty well, though, after all that worry. After our warm-ups she had a course set more or less max for BN level (my level) with a couple of jumps at N level (next level up), so I didn't end up doing a whole course at the higher level, but did the few bigger jumps sprinkled in as part of my jump courses. I'm a little proud of myself because I didn't allow myself to get too freaked out and the bigger fences actually ended up jumping rather nicely, I didn't seem to have any problem at all. Perhaps this is part of Alison's Evil Plan, sneak these bigger jumps in on me one at a time until one day I look around and realize that I'm doing whole courses of them. We'll see how this goes, I definitely feel like I'm going to be somewhat out of my comfort zone on the weeks I have a Wednesday jumping lesson, but perhaps that is a good thing. Am I ready to move up? No. But I feel like I am taking the right steps to maybe do so next season. If I had been more aggressive about my show schedule this Summer maybe I could have tried this Fall, but I'm in no hurry after all.