Its Showtime (almost...)

Its been busy busy busy round here lately as everyone comes out of their winter hibernation and ramps up for the start of the competition season!   Show clothes out of their covers, checking whether they still fit, deciding to cut down on the chocolate...   Horses being de-furred, bathed and trimmed.   I can't remember ever bathing this early in the year before and His Highness has all ready had three!

Roger's back to a good level of fitness now after his winter holidays and we've restarted interval training sessions once a week.   Felt a lot more forwards and ready to go after just one session and certainly more enthusiastic than he was last year about the whole process, and its nice to see that my fitness is able to cope with these sessions better this year too.

Training wise he's coming on well with his canter half pass feeling a lot more established now and I've started training towards being able to perform the canter HP zig zag which he's accepted really well.   This attitude change and trainability is still very novel as R's longstanding approach to life and work has been one of doing as little as he can get away with.   After about 9 months now of the new improved R I'm starting to feel it might actually be here to stay for a bit!

I'm aiming at entering some Dressage Anywhere competitions this year and we had a go at filming this month's test (Elementary 40) this week.   Unfortunately there were slight technical difficulties encountered with the filming which meant that on the run through of the test where all the transitions happened on the right markers and there weren't any mistakes or bits that I wasn't happy with, the chief camera woman accidentally missed off the first centre line from the filming (you'll also see the classy thumb partly over the lens effect if you watch it).   R was too tired to ask him to perform it again and we didn't have time to do another filming session before the end of the month deadline so we haven't been able to enter this month's competition after all, but I've added a gallery page to the website and put it on there for you all to see.   I'll also add that I injured my back the week before filming and look horrendously stiff still on the video clip.

If you would like to see the end result here it is! /gallery.html