In the torrential rain I\u00a0drove down to The Deer Park cross country in Gloucestershire to walk the show-jumping and cross country track in preparation for tomorrow’s two-phase competition.<\/p>\n
My first thought was that unless there’s some fences hidden that I couldn’t find they’ve got a pretty crap cross country working in area.<\/p>\n
My second thought was that the grass was a bit long in places, and with all the rain the surface was very slippery.<\/p>\n
Then I thought that Vin’s shoes haven’t been fitted with stud holes!<\/p>\n
Bum!<\/p>\n
I walked the track.<\/p>\n
Scary.<\/p>\n
Big.<\/p>\n
I also wondered how Vinnie would take to the course.<\/p>\n
He’s young and green and some of the fences are mentally challenging as well as physically demanding.<\/p>\n
Then I walked it again and thought it wasn’t quite so bad. Really.<\/p>\n
But still scary.<\/p>\n
And big.<\/p>\n
And I’m still worried about Vin.<\/p>\n
Then I drove back to Bromsgrove with a quick stop-over at Morrisons to do a little emergency shopping.<\/p>\n
Soph’s parents came round for tea so I cooked a kind of (minced Quorn) Shepherd’s Pie with lots of veg; cream cakes for desert. It seemed to go down fairly well.<\/p>\n
This evening there’s been a lot of off-course activity.<\/p>\n
But first you need to know that tomorrow’s two-phase is a Team competition and each team has four members.<\/p>\n
The three best scores go forward, the worst score is a discard.<\/p>\n
My team (The Warriors – very aggressive. I wondered if we should\u00a0get together before we compete and do a Haka!) consists of two people I’ve never met before as well as Sue from the yard and me.<\/p>\n
Back to this evening.<\/p>\n
Sue sent me a text saying her horse has had his back treated by the chiro today and as a consequence she’s pulled out of the two-phase.<\/p>\n
So our team has\u00a0no discard and\u00a0consists of\u00a0me and Vin – a novice pairing and threfore not exactly a short-odds bet on completing the competition!<\/p>\n
Bum.<\/p>\n
Then I received another text saying that Christine from the yard has pulled out of\u00a0an earlier, lower-height class – and asked if I’d like her slot.<\/p>\n
Well yes, was my immediate reaction.<\/p>\n
Given the difficulty and complexity of the track a lower height would probably give Vin an easier ride; could also give us more opportunity to gell our partnership.<\/p>\n
But before I could do anything about it the organiser rang asking me not to drop out or shift to a lower height \u00e2\u20ac\u201c because that would bring The Warriors down to just two competitors.<\/p>\n
Oh well.<\/p>\n
I’m still nervous as hell about the whole thing but I’ve decided that we’ll go down and look at it.<\/p>\n
If I’m not happy with anything ‘on the day’ we can always pull out; yes it would mean disappointing people but Big Vin’s safety and welfare comes first in my book.<\/p>\n
B<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the torrential rain I\u00a0drove down to The Deer Park cross country in Gloucestershire to walk the show-jumping and cross country track in preparation for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}