A little late however on Sunday 16th June Joey and I  headed to West Wilts for some stressage practice as we don’t seem to have done any dressage since September 2023!

I thought it would be wise to do 2 tests, the first one to get the booty out of his pants and the second to hopefully achieve a more relaxed test.  We booked Prelim 12 and 18.

When we arrived I discovered it was being held in the indoor due to Jump X taking place the next day, this was a first for Joey.  He warmed up nicely, probably the nicest he’s ever warmed up for dressage, but we have come on a lot with our flatwork since 2023.  Heading into the arena I was sure to chat to the judge and let him have a good look at the car and boards.

As soon as he started the tension was creeping in and his knees were getting closer and closer to his nose. Just before our first canter Joey backed right off the corner and was spooking, we had to do some pony club kicking and encouragement to get him to the corner.  Upon transitioning to canter I then had a bit of memory loss and couldn’t quite remember if the 20 meter circle was at C or E, so I did a bit of a squirkle and went across the diagonal to soon which resulted in an error ‘ding-aling-aling’.  I knew immediately what I had done and corrected my error.  We managed to finish with no more issues apart from tension.