Winter 2022
Winter 2022/2023
This Winter I wanted to focus on our flatwork, dressage is our weakest phase. However we ended up not doing as much as I’d like.
Joey did have a well deserved break after Cirencester Park in September, for a couple of weeks, the aim was to just chill for a few weeks and wind down. He also lost a shoe during the XC at Cirencester, so that was another reason for him to have a bit of a break. Quite soon I noticed that he was becoming quite grumpy on grooming, which he isn’t usually. After much mulling over and having some physio with the lovely Danielle Barnes, we found he had a tear in his left armpit, however Danielle didn’t think this was a new injury. I also found that I had stupidly wormed him and vaccinated within 48 hours of each other, which at the time I didn’t really think about. I think I had compromised his gut and made him a little sensitive.
He went on a 6 day course of Protexin Quick Fix, he’s already on a gut balancer due to my previous loan horse and dealing with ulcers. I also bought forward his chiropractic appointment, she found a few things but nothing really to worry about. She gave us some exercises to do before and after exercises and lots of baited stretches.
He slowly started to come back to his old self but it did take some time. We didn’t jump from September – January. I do think having this time to chill, really did help us both to unwind and spend time together on the ground and learn to take everything a little slower in life.
Since the New Year we’ve now had a few lessons and got properly going. We’ve joined Swindon District Riding Club, to do more as a team. I do find myself going to a lot of places on my own, we do sometimes have Tanya the super groom but she has a family and horse to look after too.
In February we did Intro Combined Training at West Wilts. The warm up felt really good, the best Joey has felt. Sadly this did go out of the window when we went in the main dressage ring. We came away with a 67.75% and a clear round, which put us in 2nd place.
In March we had our first Team event with SDRC at West Wilts, competing in the ‘Combined Challenge’ as a team, we came 3rd and as an individual we came 6th. Joey was rather jolly on this day.
We’ve also had a couple of XC schooling sessions with Diana Burgess at Tweseldown and schooling session at Larkhill with friends.
We now need to see if we can squeeze in some dressage before our first event with Horse Events on 30th April at Goring Heath, this will be our debut at this venue. We are entered for the 90cm. We just now hope it stops raining, so many events have been cancelled so far this year.
Fingers crossed.
The picture below was us flying over a table at Tweseldown.
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