A great weekend of SJ and XC training.....

I hope you have all had a nice weekend, the weather is starting to warm up a bit now which is always nice. We had a weekend busy with outings for both SJ and XC training.

Click on the above image for more pictures.....

First off was our SJ training Saturday morning with the fantastic David Pearson-Smith. As usual I shared the lesson with Sophie but as opposed to riding ‘big’ Milli, Sophie rode her baby horse, DidHe. It was good for Milli to be doing some work over smaller fences which she found rather straight forward and started to get a bit cheeky!! Once the fences went up Milli’s attention soon returned and she jumped brilliantly. She is really learning to use her back-end more when jumping which is great and helps her with the wider fences!

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As I'm sure many of you know, it was Badder’s weekend so after picking up Horse Feed on the way home from our lesson the rest of the afternoon was spent in front of the tele watching a very interesting XC day at Badminton Horse Trials un-fold!!

Back outside after watching some XC to un load all the feeds, then I decided to give the lovely Diaz a jump session at home and she was great! She’s such a bold little mare and is coming on in leaps and bounds at the moment! She absolutely loves her works and I can't wait to get her out and about competing in the near future!

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Sunday morning we went to a local XC course for a bit of schooling with some of the baby horses. There are lots of old fashioned type fences at Denne Hill with lots of logs, tyres as well as plenty of educational fences so is a great place to take a baby horse. We took DidHe with Sophie on board and I rode Diaz. This is only the second time Diaz has been ridden away from home and her first time XC schooling, not that it showed! Two of my clients kindly came with us on their horses so we had the option of a lead if any of the fences looked terrifying!

 Diaz behaved brilliantly, although I think she was slightly confused as to what she was doing out in the open with 3 other horses. Unlike some babies who, when put in a similar situation get a huge rush of adrenaline and become very over excitable, Diaz remained very calm and walked over to the course very quietly and remained walking when the others trotted and cantered away from her – big pats! J We continued to walk across the field and then we came across this square of funny coloured lumps which looked quite scary! It was a square of 8 logs all of different size! We had a walk, trot and canter around with the others, again she remained very calm and quiet! I then halted her by the logs and let her watch all the others warm up and have a jump over them. After standing very quietly I decided we’d have a trot over to the logs and just have a pop over them and see what she thought of them. She was amazing, jumped straight over them, in fact straight over anything I put in front of her, logs, tyres, ditches and banks….no problem!! She absolutely loved it and I am so excited about her future! She was making a great shape over the fences; especially behind as you can see from the pictures….she wasn’t going to touch anything! For more images & video please Click Here!

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Please click on the below pictures of Sophie riding DidHe to view larger versions.....

We’ve got an awful lot coming up over the next few weekends, starting this weekend with Milli and ‘big’ Milli both going affiliated show jumping at Cobham Manor - I’ll have to dig out my SJ gear for this and dust of the cobwebs!! Will let you know how we get on early next week.....

SG Eventing
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***Keep Calm & Canter On***