King Brian did his Intermediate with Selena today. He has already gone Intermediate with his actress owner, Megan Woods. Megan is very busy on the ‘Nashville’ film set this Winter and Selena has been lucky enough to be offered the ride. He is a lovely Irish boy as you can see in the photo.
The dressage went well. He and Selena are not fully synchronized yet and there were a couple of bobbles. The rein back wasn’t straight and the first simple change was a bit fluffy. No real problems, now that Selena has ridden him through the test at a show she knows what to prep for Redhills. They showed that they didn’t know each other terribly well in the stadium. He had the first fence down, which was a blow. Then later he had a difficult vertical out a left turn. Selena finds that she and KB sometimes turn left on different tangents! She knew that the left turns jumping were weak and she is going to school it again before Redhills.
The cross country was a blast. She felt she could have gone faster, but with Redhills so close and him having had two rails in the show jumping she was not pressuring him. He had a few time faults and finished up ninth. Not too shabby for their first Intermediate together. Selena said he was wonderful cross country and super fun to ride.
We had a good day here at the home barn. The staff did their first sets of the year with short stirrups. Short stirrup work centres their jump position and strengthens thighs and balance. All the horses are going well at home. We are getting excited about the forecast temperatures for next week and wondering if we will be working outside. We are really lucky with our sand rings. We have two and they are both massive – you can fit three 20×40 dressage arenas in each of them with room to spare. The sand and the drainage were well done from the beginning and as soon as the ice is off the top they will be good to go. The horses are looking forward to it.
Selena had lots to do when she got back to the barn or she would have told you about KBs great day herself. Tomorrow is Sovereign’s first ever event, which is a really big deal plus Marta and Thunder of course. I spend my day glued to the live scoring on evententries.com while they are at shows. The horses for tomorrow will be braided tonight then wear their neck wraps overnight. I am glad the days are stretching out a little farther, the ladies in Florida have been doing barns in the dark and using every daylight hour to ride the horses, they will be happy to have light in the evenings.
