I am so pleased to say that after a couple of months at the garage my horsebox is back, finally!
This meant that over the bank holiday weekend I took full advantage and was out with the boys almost every day (when the weather allowed).
I’m very fortunate to have my little box, but motivation certainly dwindles when you can’t get out and about for such a long period.
So, I really was desperate to get Arlo out to get over some jumps, something we’ve not done in a long time. Even though we have an arena at the yard I rarely, if ever, jump him there. This means he hasn’t jumped for at least a few months and I was looking forward to getting him out schooling.
Arlo has actually qualified for the British Novice Second Rounds, and I’m really determined to get him to them, but neither of us are ready at the moment with the lack of competing/training we have done since the new year. And this certainly showed at our arena hire.
We hired a lovely little arena over in St Neots that I’d recently seen advertised (which I highly recommend to anyone in the area). The people we hired from were lovely and they’ve done a fab job with their yard.
Anyway, we were rusty.
We kept the jumps small, and had some nice fences, but we were not working well together, really. Videos always really help me look back to see where I was going wrong (how badly I was riding) and a lot of the time Arlo was rushing. I wasn’t giving him his head over the jump, and then we just ended up with quite a few “sticky moments”, which is actually quite unlike us. The trouble is that Arlo is so careful that, the majority of the time, if he thinks he’s going to have a pole he’ll just stop, and we had a couple of those too, which, again, is quite unlike us. Anyway, I won’t blame him for my bad riding.
I know how well we can work together, and we ended with some nice work. We just came away with a lot to work on to get back to where we were pre-new year. And that’s fine. Practice makes perfect, eh?
Now the box is back I’m absolutely determined, so watch this space.
Once again I threw Arlo in at the deep end, affiliating him purely for the Arena UK second round show, and once again he pulled it out the bag. How lucky am I to have such a wonderful little horse? We haven’t really competed this year. I don’t really compete over the winter, and also my horsebox was away for repairs up until the beginning of June, so I had no transport even if I’d wanted to.
With the dry ground we don’t seem to be having much luck with shoes, as little madam managed to pull both her front shoes off within 12 hours the other day! We entered the arena with two shoes on for a schooling session and left it with one missing (took about an hour to find it). Then that afternoon, as I went to put some hoof ointment on, I looked down and had to double take, thinking I was looking at the wrong hoof. But, no, the other shoe was missing too.
After having a long wait and some lunch at the onsite café, it was time to get ready for the Joan Wolfe Overall Supreme Shetland Pony Championship. I got changed out of my usual showing outfit into black trousers and a maroon top with white spots, as you are expected to be a bit more “bling” in the evening.
We were all set to go for our next outing, and were super excited. That was until I heard the dreaded clunk of a loose shoe! I checked it over, praying it wasn’t too loose, but, nope, it was going to need a refit.