April Inspiration

''April hath put a spirit of youth in everything'' William Shakespeare

Rattling like a drug storage room trying to sort out my right side I finally took myself to the docs and I am now waiting for my referral to come through.

My back hip/leg is still rather painful and cramping when I ride despite my body doing the rattle of the pills

I feel like I riding to the best of my ability which is the best I can do.

A trip to Back2It Chiropractic is needed soon

Dentist visit this month for the boys.

The Ninja was very good. Alfie is a sensitive man, he had less work done, just a standard tidy up but he was a little sore and took a few days to start eating properly.

Good news I have noticed Alfie is comfier in his contact so although only a general check up he must have needed it.

More bit changes at the start of the month

We are now training in our cherry roller and competing in our NS tranz eggbutt

Competitions

This month we managed to conquer Alfie's walk it still lacks purpose, but the ground cover is improving, and we have the Free and Med in the right places without the dreaded jig jog or transition anticipations

Straightness drifting away on the right rein, something to work on in our training sessions

Some mini blips in the canter contact in the first few tests this month, but the transitions and canter were generally comfy to ride and didn’t resemble Giraffe I dulled down the canter transitions pre-empting freestyle so got what can only be described as having lazy beach donkey upwards trans at times

We competed at The Croft where we haven’t been for ages and we highly recommend the venue. Lovely indoor and outdoor arena. Fab catering on offer.

Friendly and quick to get scores up on the written board and the screen and a live link to follow.

If you need your results posting, you even get a copy of the results in the envelope

We also went to Fairoak this month. The warm up is a good size and the outdoor arena is lovely and quiet, a short walk up the path, but Alfie decided the indoor was a tad spooky where the surface wasn’t 100% flat in the corners.

The venue has good parking on hard standing and a grass area to munch.

A comfy place to sit with good food on offer whilst waiting for your sheets.

Results can be a little slow to come out but there is a live screen that is updated so you can see the scores.

Confidence Boost: Had a fab breakthrough riding N38 at Fairoak. This is one of our RoR Championship tests, so we thought we better have a refresher whilst we had a few shows running the same test

Trailblazer second rounds ticked off and we have our tickets to the Championships in July

We added in a midweek lesson with Ali to go through some of the moves in our Trailblazer second round Elementary test. Having dropped a competition level over the winter, to regain our confidence, we are nowhere near test ready, but we were going to give it a go We were off to a venue Alfie doesn't particular like so the plan was carefully does it, minimise any freestyle, try and do enough to qualify.

Yay we got it both Nov and Ele and I actually felt like I was in control for most of E45 which was a fabulous confidence boost.

We also had N23 to ride which went very well. In fact, it all felt so nicely and under control we have decided to give the Petplan Festival another go this year after all

Feed

As an experiment I left some of the night hay unsoaked and Alfie was coughing a lot more in the warm up. We are only washing the hay through at the moment. With less hours in the stable we have stopped steaming, but we will keep a close eye on it.

Thought I was doing right by re starting the salt but that seems to have upset the Ninja so we have removed that for now, he still has access to his lick in his stable

We will continue with the Ninja's Equibiome feed and the Green Tea

We moved onto phase two at the end of the month onto the biome supplement which will hopefully help with the inflammation.

The fresh Rosemary is being licked up by both boys. Rosemary is fabulous herbs with lots of benefits, gave Alfie a little bit and he loved it to. We also added in Thyme, this herb is known to reduce anxiety and tension and I have seen a difference in both Alfie and the Ninja in their reactions. Both have been less sharp

RoR and The Dressage Display Team

Love it or hate it April is the month we all talk about the Grand National. We remember and celebrate Horse Heros.

Our Greatest Showman Red Rum Shows us how to keep on going and dream of what you can achieve with determination. This awesome horse gives us hope to dream and conquer.

Red Rum was won back-to-back Grand Nationals in 1974

True Stories that Fairy Tales are made of. Against the odds you can do it. Hearts and Tears every time I watch the awesome moment in history when Bob Champion give the finger to cancer and Aldanti recovered from a carer threatening injury to win in 1981

RoR League 2018-2019:

Last quarter sheets have been emailed off. We now sit and wait to see where we are in the league table

RoR have published the new League rules for 2019-2020 which come into effect in May. The main change being the league will only run over Unaffiliated classes

Lambourn Open Day:

We all had an awesome day at with the RoR Dressage Display Team

Greatwood Charity Show

The 2019 date confirmed for June and the Dressage Display Team will be there performing a new routine

Good News