{"id":2388,"date":"2009-12-10T22:45:09","date_gmt":"2009-12-10T22:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2388"},"modified":"2009-12-10T22:54:22","modified_gmt":"2009-12-10T22:54:22","slug":"its-thursday-but-it-feels-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2388","title":{"rendered":"It’s Thursday but it feels like"},"content":{"rendered":"

… Friday<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I had a lesson on Tom this afternoon.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And this was flatwork, not jumping.<\/p>\n

So I should talk about the show-jumping that we did on Sunday.<\/p>\n

We had entered three classes, the 2’9″, the 3′ and the 3’3″.<\/p>\n

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*.<\/p>\n

This is puissance material! And here’s a little pic of what puissance looks like.<\/p>\n

\"hartpury-show-jumping-puissance\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Anyway, back to Sunday.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

The bloody horse stopped.<\/p>\n

Right in front of the fence.<\/p>\n

Which is penalties for a refusal.<\/p>\n

I wheeled him away and represented and we jumped the course without any further mishaps.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Later, when the 3′ class was announced we went in early, just because I was bored with hanging about.<\/p>\n

We stormed around the track.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Fortunately we stayed inside the competition arena and finished with a double-clear in 35s.<\/p>\n

The story was pretty much the same for the 3’3″, a storming double-clear in 33s.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So fast-forward to this evening.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And all was well (indeed, very well!), despite how hard it was.<\/p>\n

I might hack him tomorrow, or take him up the gallops.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

Saturday is a busy day for us humans; up to Worcestershire for lunch, then down to Oxfordshire for evening drinkies.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Yep, this time it all feels right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… 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<\/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-2388","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\/2388","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=2388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}