It’s Thursday but it feels like

… Friday.

I don’t know why. It just seems to have been a six day week already, and it’s not even F-F-F-Friday yet.

I had a lesson on Tom this afternoon.

Frankly, Owen worked me to a standstill. After 40 minutes, when he called a halt to the lesson, I slid off Tom and noticed in the mirrors that I was steaming as much as the horse was.

And this was flatwork, not jumping.

So I should talk about the show-jumping that we did on Sunday.

We had entered three classes, the 2’9″, the 3′ and the 3’3″.

Tom, in case you don’t know, seems to be part-Kangaroo because he jumps everything at the yard when he’s turned out. His latest escapade is to jump the 5’8″ post-and-rail *uphill*.

This is puissance material! And here’s a little pic of what puissance looks like.

Anyway, back to Sunday.

After warming up in the back arena, we cantered in to the competition arena. The bell went, we rode a 30m circle to the first fence and…

The bloody horse stopped.

Right in front of the fence.

Which is penalties for a refusal.

I wheeled him away and represented and we jumped the course without any further mishaps.

So Tom, the part-Kangaroo who leaps over 5’8″ post-and-rail in his spare time, didn’t like the look of a 2’9″ cross-pole-to-upright-spread?

Later, when the 3′ class was announced we went in early, just because I was bored with hanging about.

We stormed around the track.

In fact, after the second part of the first double (fence 6b) we were going so fast that I had my doubts that we were going to make the corner in time, and had visions of us hurdling over the post-and-rail and carving our own path through the lorry park.

Fortunately we stayed inside the competition arena and finished with a double-clear in 35s.

The story was pretty much the same for the 3’3″, a storming double-clear in 33s.

We were beaten by faster double-clears so we came home prizeless, but we had jumped two competition rounds successfully, and that’s pretty good in anyone’s book. Especially mine.

So fast-forward to this evening.

The obvious thing to do under Owen’s stare, would have been to polish our jumping further, but instead I tacked up with the dressage saddle and we concentrated on some fairly advanced flatwork.

And all was well (indeed, very well!), despite how hard it was.

I might hack him tomorrow, or take him up the gallops.

Vin didn’t get worked today but he got lots of carrots and a big grooming. He will get work tomorrow too, though.

I have a mountain of tack to clean again, this wet, muddy weather isn’t conducive to keeping tack clean, so that’s what I’ll do after tomorrow’s exercise.

Saturday is a busy day for us humans; up to Worcestershire for lunch, then down to Oxfordshire for evening drinkies.

I’ll probably try to ride both horses on Sunday, but we have the talented indie-band ‘inLight‘ coming in on Sunday evening, to be guests on the podcast.

On Monday the vet is coming out to give Tom his annual ‘Flu/Tet, and once that’s done I shall come back home and continue processing his registration with British Eventing.

The first of our planned One Day Events opens for entries on the 12th of February, so we need to stay focussed on our schooling and training.

A week Sunday there’s an indoor cross-country (?) competition not too far away; it would be good to take Tom as part of the warm-up for the 2010 Eventing season.

Suddenly, for the first time in many years, I feel as though I’m looking at the start of an Eventing season and thinking that this time it’s all achievable.

We have a draft competition schedule that begins with a few Events at Intro, then a few at Pre-Novice, a couple of Open Pre-Novice and then a couple at the Novice level to close the season.

Yep, this time it all feels right.