Annie has a swollen leg

Unfortunately we couldn't compete on Sunday, as I discovered that morning that her leg had swollen up over night. She is sound, thankfully, however she is now enjoying (or not!) cold hosing and a few days of rest to help the swelling go down. Hopefully it will clear in a couple of days and she will be back to her usual tricks!

I let her play in the school for a while on Sunday to stretch her legs, and roll around in the sand!

Prelim 7 at Addington!

Apologies for the quality of the picture - as you can see it was really dark and the weather was awful! A huge thanks to Dad for sticking with me all morning and still persevering to take pictures despite the elements!

On Saturday I fulfilled my ambition of riding at Addington Manor, but we didn't just compete - we got placed! We finished 8th out of 34 entries on a score of 61% which was a fantastic result, despite the awful weather. Unfortunately Annie found the arena's at Addington rather spooky, and as a result didn't work at her best. Torrential rain, gusty winds blowing through the giant conifers and lorries arriving and leaving directly next to our test arena didn't lend themselves to a very focused Annie! I am pleased to get this Addington debut under my belt, and next time hopefully Annie won't be quite so spooked by the place. Fingers crossed for better weather too!


Next weekend we are competing at Prelim 7 and a Prix Caprilli indoors, thank goodness!

Show jumping training

Despite our competition today being cancelled due to gale force winds, we still persevered with our training session with John Mears on the 1st December. We focused on some gymnastic jumping, improving Annie's reaction times as she had to be very fast with her feet and also working towards that illusive 'independent seat', which is slowly but surely beginning to make an appearance. The weather was terrible - to give you an idea of how wet I was, those breeches were light grey when I put them on! Needless to say I spent the following few hours tucked up in bed drying up and thawing out!

It is a shame I couldn't get out to compete today and practise the techniques John had taught me, but fingers crossed for next weekend instead!