Show Jump Practise at Tielcey Park Stables

Such creativity within my blog titles lately!

I mentioned a while back that I had an upcoming show jumping clinic with a well known NZ rider.

The last time I jumped was April 2014, where I was pretty nervous for no good reason. As I mentioned in that blog post, it had been around three years before that that I last jumped.

It may have been mad to book into a jumping clinic with no real practise, but I decided it was the only way I would move forward and actually practise. So, a couple of days prior to the clinic, T and I floated our horses out to Tielcey Park Stables to pop over the jumps and settle our horses in the arena. Oscar looks at everything and I didn't want to pay for a spot on the clinic only to have my horse running sideways across the arena every time he saw something he didn't like.

We got to Tielcey, and already Oscar seemed a lot more settled than he did when I took him for a hack along the bridle path; good sign. I think as long as he can see a horse then he is okay!

(Oh! He also got clipped last week. Just a simple blanket clip because at one point we were down to do our first ever hunt. I've decided against hunting him, my reasons for doing so can go in a post for another time though - back to our jumping outing.)

So Oscar was settled straight off the bat when we arrived, T and I left the horses whilst we went and set up a few jumps. There was a LOT of variety, we set up a few uprights, oxers, a double, a wall and a hanging filler or two just to see if there would be any aversion to anything. The heights varied from a 30cm (1'0") cross rail to one or two 70cm (2'3") uprights/oxers. T and her horse jumped everything, whereas I didn't quite have my brave pants on. I jumped one of the larger oxers as part of a double, the wall and a hanging filler that T's horse stopped at. Oscar went over everything without batting an eyelid, so I stopped quite early. No need to overdo it. I'm of the opinion that a horse doesn't forget how to jump, so unless you're working on something specific then you don't need to jump everything in the arena. It's the excuse I come up with anyway when I don't feel particularly excited to jump all of the jumps - ha!

So all in all a really successful short and sweet eye opener prior to the show jumping clinic - which I will talk about in my next post. I'm almost up to date with my posts now, just got a post about the clinic coming up, then I had another lesson with C on Friday which left me both hating and loving dressage at the same time. I have a show jumping lesson with a new trainer that has been highly recommended for me this Wednesday, and then a jam packed weekend with a cross country practise, a dressage show and then judging a pony club gymkhana on Monday, which is ANZAC day and therefore a public holiday. Even typing it out is a mouthful!


* fun and jumps aside, I finally purchased a basic blogger template and got rid of the awful thing I had going on for a week or so there. I wanted something super basic that I could play with, without having to change code for the rest of the template whenever I changed a colour here or there. This one is a blank slate pretty much, so I'm looking forward to honing my photoshop skills and refreshing  my knowledge of HTML!