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It was a quick turnaround for Soap and I after 10 days at Rosie’s SJ Boot Camp we had just 3 days back at home to get ourselves sorted before we set off for our first 3DE! I met up with my sponsor Jonathan from Equine Premium the evening before and he gave me some promotional flyers to take and an Equine Premium cap to wear so with that and Soap’s ridiculous ‘on tour rider’ (Evian, only the red smarties, and fresh meadow grass) packed we set off. It was a few miles into our journey that I realised the…

After our big step backwards SJ-wise at Highclere I bit the emotional and financial bullet and sent Soap to ‘SJ School’ with my trainer Rosie Moss. He stayed for 10 days during which I had 2 lessons, and he had a mane makeover! I couldn’t believe the difference I felt in him in my first lesson his canter was so much more active, and I could really feel his hind legs coming through and under the saddle. Rosie thinks he is very sensitive, and also needs even more building up to be able to sustain a SJ canter for longer.…

Highclere is a local event to me and I have always wanted to do the BE100/PreNovice course there as it is a fab gallopy undulating course with the real ‘old school event’ vibe to it. In advance of Highclere because I knew it was a tough track I entered Soap for WWEC (2) BE100 and he had completed their unaff ODE over the BE100 track just a few weeks before so I thought 2 runs at BE100 height would be a good level of prep. Unfortunately WWEC (2) was cancelled due to bad weather so we focused our efforts on…

In prep for Highclere BE100 we have been jumping jumping jumping, and on Sunday I found a local show to take Soap to for a couple of rounds on grass. I must have looked like a clueless eventer with my yellow tagged hat, tweed jacket, and list of daft questions which included…’Do we get a course walk?’ ‘yes of course!’ said the baffled looking steward ‘How do we know what order to go in for the JO?…’ ‘Do we have to wear our jackets?’ etc etc you get the idea (I’m a bit rusty at straight SJing) and I’m pretty…

…well maybe not a whole range just yet, but my personalised XC top now has a hoody to keep it company! I plan to wear this as much as possible at events so if you see me please come and say ‘Hi’ as it would be great to meet some fellow local eventers. Big thanks for the hoody go to my friends Emily and Paul who made it and are now probubly thinking they have opened the floodgates! personalised t-shirts, tracky bums, rugs, saddle cloths, wash bag, pants, socks the possibilities are endless….

Today I booked the day off work to take Soap to West Wilts EC for some Eventers Combined Training. We got held up by slow moving traffic and what looked like a drugs bust going on with lots of police in the road so we arrived a little later than I had planned! With only 12 minutes to warm up for dressage Soap was going well but really needed another 15mins to be listening properly, and knock the edge off him. So after warming up to ‘tepid’ rather than ‘piping hot’ we had to start our test. All was going…

We went for our 2nd SJ schooling session at Hoplands last Saturday, and managed to build on the success of the last outing. We had a few ‘yes’ ‘no’ ‘maybe’ moments to begin with as I had failed to establish an active enough canter. I find it really hard to feel on Soap when he is in the correct SJing canter as he is just so comfortable in all his ‘special versions of canter’, but when he dropped into the right soft, but active canter he began snorting in time with the stride. This ‘SJ Snorting’ is a huge help…

A few miles down the road from my house is a new tack shop called ‘Trotters’ (and yes they are independant traders!) Allison at Trotters has kindly agreed to sponsor me! Hopefully with them being so local I can help them out in return by good old word of mouth, flyers, and through my local horsey connections. I think Allison was taking a big risk with her profit margins when she emailed me and said ‘just pop into the shop and see if there’s anything you need’ The words ‘supermarket sweep’ sprung to mind! She very kindly supplied me with…

Apologies blog readers for the recent quite spell from GHE, in the run up to West Wilts BE100 I unfortunately went down with Swine Flu! I was not relishing the concept of competing while still fighting off the bug so was half relieved and half disappointed when West Wilts was cancelled because of the ridiculous amounts of rain we’ve been having here in Wiltshire. To cheer myself up I have entered Soap in the BE100 at Highclere. It’s an event I have wanted to do for ages so I’m really excited about it.

Well yet another wet SJ schooling session, where has the summer gone?… Despite the gopping weather we had another very constructive lesson with Robert. We started by leg yielding to make sure Soap was off the leg and moving his quarters, this then progressed to a small 3 loop serpentine where the middle loop is done in counter bend. This exercise was very useful to shorten Soap up and engage, once we had achieved that we moved on to canter from walk transitions to make him quick off the leg. The transitions had to be from a slow steady walk…