{"id":3253,"date":"2010-05-17T22:42:44","date_gmt":"2010-05-17T21:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=3253"},"modified":"2010-05-17T22:49:06","modified_gmt":"2010-05-17T21:49:06","slug":"nellie-the-elephant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=3253","title":{"rendered":"Nellie the elephant"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since I did an equine update so…<\/em><\/p>\n

Vin’s headshaking continues to improve; the treatment seems to be capable of mitigating about 90% of his most serious symptom, which is a massive win.<\/p>\n

I’m so happy with the way he’s responding that I’m now devoting quite a lot of time and effort to finding him a convalescent home; a place where he can spend a year resting, and allowing his back ligaments to repair.<\/p>\n

Yay Vin!<\/p>\n

Tom’s getting quite a lot of work thrown at him and while this seems to be suiting his attitude and temperament, it means he’s now incredibly well-muscled and fighting fit.<\/p>\n

I schooled him in flatwork on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday and Friday we schooled over the cross-country course and had a great time!<\/p>\n

On Saturday Tom and I went to a local show-jumping competition at an agricultural college.<\/p>\n

Disaster.<\/p>\n

He worked in brilliantly, we jumped well and he needed just a very light-touch over the 1.10m warming-up fences.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it was a different story in the arena where Tom napped badly back towards the collecting-ring, and we were eliminated.<\/p>\n

The following day – yesterday – Tom and I went to a combined training (dressage and show-jumping) competition at Stow-on-the-Wold.<\/p>\n

Not disaster!<\/p>\n

I was a bit hazy on the dressage test, and the judge didn’t ‘get’ my pick ‘n’ mix approach to the sport, so we had a couple of ‘errors of course’ but, apart from them, we came away with some very respectable marking right down the sheet.<\/p>\n

The show-jumping was a nice big arena, but it consisted of the scariest, spookiest, shiniest set of BSJA\/JAS-style fences I’ve ever seen.<\/p>\n

And we bombed round.<\/p>\n

I was a little more assertive than the previous day, and we tanked round. The final fence was an absolute galloping monster of a five-bar gate with a rail on top; it came at us so quickly I didn’t really have time to fiddle our speed down so I went forward and encouraged and Tom answered with a beautifully basculed shape over it, even if we were slightly above the national speed limit.<\/p>\n

Big smiles and many pats!<\/p>\n

The rest of the week looks like this: gridwork tomorrow, flatwork on Wednesday and cross-country schooling on Thursday.<\/p>\n

On Friday Tom’s off to NN14 3JA to do a Pre-Nervous with Sammi. I might let her do a Novice with him later in the season, but the plan is that Tom and I crack on and just have fun.<\/p>\n

There’s another combined training competiton the following weekend, and the weekend after that is our ‘home’ One-Day Event<\/p>\n

Good times!<\/p>\n

p.s. the title springs from a rhythm exercise; the perfect show-jumping canter is supposed to be the same beat as a correctly-paced chorus of the song ‘Nellie the elephant’, or so I was told in Pony Club. Maybe it was just a cruel joke to get that tune embedded in to my head!
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since I did an equine update so… Vin’s headshaking continues to improve; the treatment seems to be capable of mitigating about<\/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-3253","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\/3253","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=3253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}