Great start to this week!

I had one of the best Mondays for a long time, finally it felt like spring/summer had arrived! The sun was shining, it was more than +20c under the sun, and the horses were incredibly happy. It's a great feeling when you have a happy horse underneath you.

After Vallu's freak accident last Monday, I have been taking it very very easy with him in order to let him recover. Wednesday to Friday I had lunged him very lightly to let him move a bit and to check if he was still moving okay. On Saturday I rode him for ten minutes just to see how he was doing, and in all honesty, it didn't feel that nice. The trot was unbalanced, he was unsteady in his mouth and the canter felt all choppy. I felt equally horrendous. Worried, stressed and incredibly anxious. Ergh, basically horrible. So, to improve I decided to lunge him properly on Sunday, with side reins and everything. Although he wasn't too happy about the fact that he actually had to work instead of just larking about the arena, in the end he worked well through his back and looked nice and soft through his mouth.

And so I returned to the saddle, to be more than pleasantly surprised. Underneath me was a very happy horse who wanted to work, who wasn't spooking at all and who was very excited! Even though we only worked for about 20 minutes (15 minutes of trot and 5 minutes of canter) Vallu was completely soaked through with sweat, as it was the first proper hot day of the year. It was great to be able to ride outside in a t-shirt and to be warm! Mum was watching and said that even though he is fat, he is moving fine and that I can carry on bringing him back to work :D

Rama and I have our first ever competition this Saturday at our neighbor's riding school! I'm really excited, and even though it's not a big competition or anything official, I'll get to see how we work together at a competitions and see if we can go to some bigger competitions later on. We're doing Vaativa B MB Special (a medium test if converted into the BD levels I think?) which a great test since it has lots of canter work (flying changes, extended canters, canter-walk transitions) and it also has shoulder-in and half pass in trot.

Naked ponies!