When disaster strikes

 I know the title of the blog post sounds a little overly dramatic, but it did feel like I was hit by a disaster train at full speed yesterday! I decided to take Vallu out for a hack, since he hadn't been on one all week, and as he had been really good for the last two days,  I felt like it's only fair to reward him - and anyway, who doesn't wanna go out for a sunny Sunday afternoon hack? To make a long story short, I have now experienced how it feels like to sit on a rearing bronco bucking galloping at full speed Vallu. And I never want to experience that again.

Riding Saturday evening during a lightning and thunder storm that made the sky pink!

 After a day of being miserable and crying on the phone to mum, today we managed to get over it and had a brilliant ride! After seeing the BD competition on Sunday, I felt like pushing us forwards into more advanced work that is included in the advanced tests, such as trot half passes and extended trots. It felt like everything kinda clicked together, and Vallu understood me and everything that I was asking.

Even though it was really windy and the doors kept making noises, Vallu managed to concentrate nearly most of the time on me, which I really appreciate. It must be very difficult for a prey animal to trust another animal instead of running away in fright, and those days that Vallu manages to trust me really make me feel good :) 

Went better today! :)

 We have our first proper dressage training in 3 weeks time with Andrew Fletcher, and hopefully the work that I need to do for uni will have calmed down by then, so that I can start concentrating more on working with Vallu towards getting ready to start competing in February!

For the rest of the week we'll continue to train trot work and I'll try to get myself more fit so that I won't start puffing after 5 minutes of sitting trot!! And Vallu should be getting clipped this week, which means that we can ride for longer because he won't get so sweaty!