thaxted
27th Sep 2004, 03:10 AM
Hi Everyone
Well - the sad news is that I've now had my last ride on Venus....her owner doesn't want her to compete any more. She's come on a lot this year and I've also learnt so much so I'm glad that I've had this year of riding her.
Yesterday we competed in the final leg of a 5 month 2-phase competition. Some of you may remeber that I'd never done x-country before this year. Anyway, she did a good clear round in the show jumping but didn't really want to do the x-country phase so she stopped once at the second fence and then wouldn't jump fence 4 at all. It was quite tricky (though from a distance this wasn't obvious). I had worried about it when I walked the course. It was a two bar upright, quite narrow and set on a steep downwards slope so the horse had to jump off the slope to get over it. She's never done this type of jump before and just wouldn't try yesterday! I took her round it and she did the rest of the course fine - even some quite scary jumps that I had thought she would struggle with.
so....what's the good news????
Well - even with our poor performance yesterday, we still manged to win the overall league!!!!! I've never won anything like this before, we got a lovely (huge) rosette and a horse rug! So it all ended on a happy note.
I'm now not going to ride for a while as I have to have an operation today - nothing serious but its on my stomach so I'll not be allowed to ride for a while - then I'll see what turns up.
Well - the sad news is that I've now had my last ride on Venus....her owner doesn't want her to compete any more. She's come on a lot this year and I've also learnt so much so I'm glad that I've had this year of riding her.
Yesterday we competed in the final leg of a 5 month 2-phase competition. Some of you may remeber that I'd never done x-country before this year. Anyway, she did a good clear round in the show jumping but didn't really want to do the x-country phase so she stopped once at the second fence and then wouldn't jump fence 4 at all. It was quite tricky (though from a distance this wasn't obvious). I had worried about it when I walked the course. It was a two bar upright, quite narrow and set on a steep downwards slope so the horse had to jump off the slope to get over it. She's never done this type of jump before and just wouldn't try yesterday! I took her round it and she did the rest of the course fine - even some quite scary jumps that I had thought she would struggle with.
so....what's the good news????
Well - even with our poor performance yesterday, we still manged to win the overall league!!!!! I've never won anything like this before, we got a lovely (huge) rosette and a horse rug! So it all ended on a happy note.
I'm now not going to ride for a while as I have to have an operation today - nothing serious but its on my stomach so I'll not be allowed to ride for a while - then I'll see what turns up.