Another month has gone by, and how quickly this year is going. I am very pleased to say I am now back on board and absolutely loving my time riding Rabbit. I am pleased to say I appear to have come back from my break actually riding better than I did before, LOL!
Leonie has been absolutely fabulous, and we have taken it very slow from the start, doing a lot of working walk insuring I could remember my aids correctly.
After a couple of weeks of slow work, we moved up into the trot and canter, and I’m glad to say the transition has been fairly straightforward.
I did, however, have a clerical mess up this month. After looking at my results, I was fairly sure I had two sheets that would’ve counted towards qualification for the associated Championships. With this in mind, I decided to go out and do one more test to give me my third sheet that I needed. The deadline for the qualifications was August 31st, and I only realised this by about the 20th of August.
This meant I had a very short period of time to try to find a test locally that I could get to. Unfortunately, for one of those weeks, Leonie was on holiday.
This meant that the chances of being able to find a test that we could go to together was very slim. I did manage to find a test, but it was whilst Leonie was on holiday. This meant that the week before, I was left to my own devices to try to carry on the good work that we had started.
Lee stepped up to the plate and accompanied me as driver and moral support. I decided to only do the easier of the Medium tests as at the time I thought I only needed the one test, and I didn’t feel we were quite ready for the harder qualifying test. I’m very pleased to say the test went a lot better than I expected, and we managed to pull out a personal-best at 66.67%. However, when I went to send in my qualification results for the Championships, I realised that I had read one of my qualifications as a standard test when it was actually an Area Festival. Therefore, it was not eligible for the associated qualification. This was very frustrating as it was the first year we had been eligible for the associated Championships, and I was very much looking forward to taking Rabbit to the veterans.
But we live and learn, and we moved on. Thankfully, the test that we did is still eligible for use as an Area Festival qualification, so we do have one sheet towards Area Festivals already.
We have decided to get my other two qualifications as quickly as we possibly can, as once this is under our belt we can once again leap into the world of flying changes and see if we can nail these to enable us to move up a level. I have a test booked for the 7th of October at Southport to do Medium 61 and Medium 73. It’s been a while since I’ve done a qualifying Medium test, and to this point I have still only done seven Medium tests. Thankfully, Leonie is available to come with me for these. I’m very much looking forward to it. At the moment, we are really working in detail on the training. I’ve started doing things that I’ve never truly had to think about before, as in using my seat bones. This is making my brain ache a lot, as it involves a lot of coordination and thinking at this stage.
So if you could all cross your fingers for me on the 7th, and hopefully, we will have a successful and enjoyable outing.
© Sue Palmer, The Horse Physio, 2021
Treating your horse with care, connection, curiosity and compassion
