Mud, mud, glorious mud

really long post…

Saturday’s BE went according to plan. Except for the dressage, the show-jumping and the cross-country.

The weather broke on Friday and the sky began throwing heavy rain down while I was walking the show-jumping and cross-country tracks in the afternoon.

The rain continued overnight and in to Saturday morning.

We arrived at the venue at 6.20am, I got changed in to dressage clothes, went off to find the secretary to get my hat tagged and pick up my numbers. Then, in the still pouring rain, I unloaded Tom, tacked up, put studs in his hind shoes, mounted up and hacked over to the dressage ‘working in’ area.

We warmed up for an hour in the pouring rain, Tom became more fractious with every minute, but I don’t think that was weather-related.

By the time we were called in for our test it felt as if I was sitting on a bomb.

‘Argumentative’ would be a good word to describe how things went. Tom gawped at everything, lacked attention, offered the movements no significant or consistent concentration and, as a result, we failed to achieve any of the softness and suppleness we have built up over the last four or five months.

In fact we bronked our way around the arena in the pouring rain, it was very exciting. I thought our first canter transition was going to be acceptable, based on the previous movement, but Tom had other ideas. On the canter transition he fired in a really big buck and pinged me so far in to the air that when I looked down I could see his whole shape beneath me – I must have been a good two feet out of the saddle.

And that sums up our dressage test, it was all pretty much like that. Argumentative.

Back at the lorry I switched Tom’s saddle from dressage to jumping, changed his Bit, put his martingale, brushing and over-reach boots on and hacked up to the show-jumping warming up.

Actually, we worked in nicely; I didn’t over-jump him, it was still pouring with rain and although the ground in the show-jumping warming up was holding up, I didn’t want to risk slipping or skidding. We jumped just enough to make sure that we were forward-going, had a nice jumping rhythm and a set of brakes.

The minute we rode in to the arena though, all this changed.

Tom wouldn’t go near the sponsor’s banner that we had to pass, so I leg-yielded him forward until we were clear and he would go in a straight line.

We transitioned to canter, pushed on forwards and turned to fence 1.

Tom stopped.

Three strides out he started slowing to a halt and that was us with a refusal at the first fence. He stopped because he just wasn’t looking, didn’t have his mind on the job at all and was gawping at the fences, the decorations and the flags.

I wheeled him away, represented and we zipped over and then we hit our stride. Our ‘stride’ though, felt much too quick, Tom was in the driving seat and he wouldn’t give me the soft bouncing show-jumping canter that we’ve achieved in recent months. No matter how much weight I put in to the saddle and tried to collect his front end, he wouldn’t hear of it.

After fence 8 we had another issue where he spooked and stopped because we had to pass close to a petrol generator that one of the catering tradestands was using. I was able to re-collect, get our pace together again and we flew over 9 and 10.

Unfortunately I was defensive at fence 10 because a) it was an enormous spread and b) we were flying at it. But we finished the show-jumping with 10 time and 12 show-jumping penalties.

The time penalties were to be expected after the refusal at fence 1 and the dicking around after fence 8. The jumping penalties we picked up were because he wouldn’t give me the show-jumping canter, so instead, we flew over everything too fast and too flat and, inevitably when going like that, we hit a few fences down.

Back at the lorry I changed out of my soaking show-jumping jacket and in to cross-country colours.

The cross-country working-in area was wet and boggy. We were held in the collecting ring for 45 minutes while we waited for the Air Ambulance to arrive, pick up a poor, unfortunate casualty and medevac them to hospital.

Because of the ‘hold’ on the course our start times didn’t apply so we had to rely on the good will of the cross-country stewards to let us go asap. Unfortunately asap didn’t happen and we were told that we could go ‘in 4 horses time’.

We were told that three times, with five minutes between each telling. I’m not whining about this. The accident happened and, as a result, the organised system of times gets thrown out.

But, unfortunately, when we were called out to the start box the persistent rain and the seeping cold had even worked their way through my body protector and Tom had gone off the boil.

I hadn’t wanted to keep working in over the cross-country practice fences because the take-off and landing surfaces had, by now, been well dug up!

When the starter said ‘Go’ we rode out of the start box but Tom didn’t have the customary forward-doing keenness about him, showed a hitherto unexplored ability to go sideways and he refused at fence 1.

We represented and cleared it and went on to fence 2 where, despite me riding him quite hard, he stopped again. We represented and cleared it but as soon as we rode down the long, steep hill to fence 3 I could feel him backing off again.

So I took the pragmatic approach, I called it a day and we retired from the competition at that point.

Yesterday, over tea and biscuits in the tack-room, we had an inquest over the performances of all four of the horses from our yard that had competed on Saturday. The fifth horse had been due to compete on Sunday, but the organisers had abandoned the event due to flooding on Saturday evening which had made the course unsafe.

Our dressage sheet will make interesting reading when it arrives, but it won’t tell me anything that I don’t already know: Tom went in to hyperdrive, wouldn’t listen and was disobedient for almost the entire test.

The show-jumping could have been better, but we have a cunning plan to help sharpen Tom’s concentration. We’re going to adopt French Blinkers, a device that Tom’s previous owner, James, used. Hopefully the French Blinkers will sharpen Tom’s concentration on what’s in front of him and reduce the opportunity for him to spook at things.

The cross-country was nothing more than unfortunate. Being held in the collecting ring for such a long period of time could not have been avoided, and the very soft going that made me not want to risk jumping the cross-country practice fences too much, was just one of those things.

However, the use of French Blinkers for the cross-country phase will also help sharpen Tom’s concentration and focus his mind on the job in hand.

We’re also going to change Tom’s feed. Normally I can get inside his head without any difficulty, but on Saturday the atmosphere at the One Day Event scrambled his brain and all I could get from him was static. Reducing some of the more ‘active’ components in his feed will hopefully help him to calm down.

And we’re considering swapping his nosesband from a ‘flash’ to a ‘grackle’.

Yes, I’m disappointed at our performance. The dressage was dire (50.5 penalties, when I’d been expecting – based on our recent performances – something in the 29-33 range).

The show-jumping could be improved, but there actually weren’t too many things wrong with how we went.

The cross-country was the biggest disappointment, knowing Tom’s enjoyment for cross-country fences.

I could say all kinds of things in mitigation: our first One Day Event together, the first One Day Event of the season, the weather was awful, the ground was unpleasant, we were cold, we were wet…

But the truth is I do have higher expectations of us than the performance we turned in on Saturday.

In a few weeks time we go all the way down to Wiltshire to do it all over again.

Here’s hoping it won’t be as bad as this!: