Fulmart Feeds Blog – 31.07.13
Well that’s July done for another year and it’s been a busy
old month.
As anyone who goes eventing will know, you’re on a hiding to
nothing if you can’t nail the dressage so I decided to put some real work into
this over the last couple of months. My background is more in showjumping so
I’ve tended to find this the more straight forward phase and have had to learn
a lot when it comes to the dressage. I now have two totally different horses
(Alfie and Herbie) which means I have to adapt my way of riding from one to the
other, the up side of this though is that my riding has improved a lot as I can
learn from them both.
Since my last blog
Herbie has done two events and is improving all the time, he went clear cross
country in both of these and in my latest event (Thornton Watlass @
Breckenbrough) we led after the dressage by a margin of 4.5 marks. I was absolutely
thrilled with this as he showed some real class. Unfortunately we had 3 down
showjumping before completing a beautiful clear across country leaving us 9th.
A good workman never blames his tools but since Breckenbrough we have changed
his saddle and it has made an immediate improvement to his jumping. Yesterday I
took him to Ryedale Show for the Burghley Young Event Horse qualifier where we
had to do a dressage test, followed by a round of showjumping and then a trot
up to be judged on conformation etc (by Chris Bartle!). I was absolutely
thrilled with him; we scored the highest mark of the day (out of 50
competitors) in the dressage and just had 2 poles down in the showjumping, it
was by far the biggest track he has ever jumped so I was over the moon with
him. We didn’t qualify but the standard in these classes is very high so I
think he did really well to hold his own.
It seems Herbie is not the only one showing class in the
dressage phase, Alfie also went to Breckenbrough last weekend and scored a
fabulous 28 in his dressage, clear showjumping and then a very silly rider
error at a coffin meant 20 penalties in the xc phase dropping us out of
contention. All in all Breckenbrough was a frustrating weekend as we were set
up after dressage for a win on Herbie and a second on Alfie but it just shows
the importance of each of the 3 phases!
Herbie is having a well earned rest for the next couple of
weeks before hopefully making the step up to BE100 at Richmond and I am taking
Alfie xc schooling this evening (more of a refresher for me than for the
horse!) before going to Skipton this weekend. Alfie also has 3 qualifications
for the BE100 Regional Finals so I am working hard on qualifying him for the
Badminton Grassroots Championships next year. The experience this year was
amazing so to qualify at the next level up would be great, the qualifiers start
in September so I will keep you posted!
The wedding planning is in full swing at the moment so any
spare weekends are being spent wedding dress shopping, meeting with caterers etc,
it’s all great fun although Dad can’t decide which is worse, constant
conversations about weddings or constant conversations about horses!!
As always I will Tweeting regular updates (@LucindaCawood)
but for now it’s ‘over and out’.
‘Team Cawood’
