In my quest to give Tissy the retirement she deserves I have been researching new places to ride within an hour of the yard. Tissy finds hacking at home boring, she loves a new place to explore and really comes alive when she has fresh pastures to conquer! She still endures the odd hack out at home, I tell her she needs to do some boring fitness work so that she can go to pony parties, in reality she doesn’t need much work to happily bimble around a 16km, but still, a bit of preparation makes me feel better.

I’m aiming for one outing a month between March & November, so if anyone has any suggestions then please send them my way, we live near Uttoxeter so our access to the A50, M6, M1 & M42 are pretty good!

This time we headed to Acton Hall Equestrian centre for their Park & Ride. It’s £5 per horse, you’re paying for the parking facilities rather than the ride. The route is all on public land through some lovely woods with a mix of sandy tracks and fire road. When you book on you get a talk around and a little map but it’s fairly straight forward to get to the woods and have an explore.

We did about 10km but you could easily add on more tracks and loops to up the distance. Tissy wasn’t the epitome of a well behaved experienced endurance pony…she wanted to explore at full speed and was very cross about the restrictions placed upon her by her (in her opinion) overly cautious rider!

Nevertheless, we both had a lovely time and it’s definitely an option to come back for training in the future.

Estrid is not a horse you can throw in the deep end, she needs practice and routine and patience to thrive. So as tempting as it was to make our first ride an 80km to get that FEI qualification, so we could do a 1* at Windsor, I knew in my heart and head that it wouldn’t be right for her, especially as my work schedule has meant we’ve not even been out to a social ride yet.

I entered the 49km class so that we’d have some vet gate practice and plenty of time to get back into the swing of things. It was so nice to not worry about whether we’d have a low enough heart rate to even pass the initial vetting as Estrid was quite relaxed for her.

In all honesty I didn’t have much say on the pace for the first 23km…if I asked for slower she would get so silly that she was either going to pull a muscle or trip so I did my best to balance her, choose a good line and keep a nice rhythm. We ended up doing the first 32km loop at 15kph, a bit faster than I’d wanted.

In the vet gate she point blank refused to be sloshed down without throwing a hissy fit so we just had to untack and wait. We still managed a respectable presentation time and she vetted beautifully despite being the only horse up at the vetting. She still refused to have the sweat and grit washed off her in the hold and took Dan for a stomp around the venue rather than chill and eat. Tissy also never relaxed for the first vet gate so this doesn’t worry me, Estrid was obviously feeling fresh and excited to be on the move.

The second loop she was much more manageable, so we set a pace of 13kph, she’s still not great at riding with other horses so we did most the ride by ourselves with little sections with others, it’s something I’d like to change as I think she’d actually really enjoy running with a group once she got used to it. Saying that she was a bit sad when the horses we’d just joined split off on another route and lost a bit of the spring in her step.

She drank really well and grudgingly accepted sloshes out on course, at the final vetting had it been a vet gate we could have gone in on 4 minutes, which I was really pleased about. We waited a little longer until her heart rate was in the low 50’s just to make sure and she gave her final trot up the same enthusiasm as her first.

I had a really lovely day, with Dan crewing and Estrid clearly enjoying being out on course. It was nice to see the familiar faces of the endurance family and be back out and about. Haywood oaks was so well organised, from the super professional rider packs to the marking, the route was wonderful to ride, but to really top it off the prize giving and prizes were amazing!

The cherry on an already fantastic cake was Estrid winning her class! We had a lovely cupcake, some gloves, a headcollar from Old Mill animal feeds and a Spa day voucher from Saywell equestrian rehab centre, a Haywood oaks keyring and a certificate! Thank you so so much to the organisers, sponsors and their arm of helpers who made the event possible, it is truly appreciated. What a great start to our 2025 season!

Our training hasn’t been ideal leading up to our first competition, with weather and work, but we have made the most of the time we have had and kept as consistent as we could.

Estrid has had 32 training sessions in the last 12 weeks leading up to Haywood Oaks.

• 5 hill walks
• 9 Polework (ridden and in-hand)
• 9 Hacks (including two on gallops)
• 3 Schooling
• 6 Water treadmill

I aim for 4 sessions a week. Mondays are usually poles, hill walks or schooling. Wednesday has been our water treadmill day. Friday and Sunday are our hacking days. Which meant more often than not she was only being ridden twice a week and worked from the ground on the other days.

She is actually starting to look pretty good so maybe this method really suits her, but as we prepare for our next 80km she will have more ridden work and less groundwork. I’m still going to keep to 4 sessions a week as life and work are pretty manic at the moment and 4 sessions seems doable to keep everything in balance.

Packing for our first ride of the season seems to have come around so quickly now we’re actually here, but in reality it’s been 3 months of preparation so let’s hope we make it and we have a good time!

I have only ever used a water treadmill for rehab purposes in the past, both in my human work as a Physio and for my horses. Whenever I’ve wanted a horse treadmilling I have sent them to Readwood rehabilitation near Burnley, for 2-6 weeks. They do an absolutely amazing job but at 2.5hrs away from me it wasn’t really an option for using the water treadmill for strength training as part of my pre-season programme for Estrid.

Lucky for me Legacy Equine rehabilitation are only a 15minute drive from our yard and a lovely friend had also got me some vouchers, so I reached out to them to book 12 weeks of water treadmilling from January as part of our pre-season training.

I decided to add it in this year as Estrid is very mobile through her spine and she needs more strength & stability, it’s tricky in winter to get some decent training in due to the weather and daylight so this was a great way of getting consistent, good quality training no matter what the weather.

I have really enjoyed watching Estrid change the way she moves, her posture and fitness over the last few weeks, and I would really like to continue using it as part of her training. I will 100% book 12 weeks for pre-season next year but I’m not sure how to use it going forward, realistically I can’t afford weekly sessions all season, so I will have to do some research on what kind of frequency is needed for any improvement/results but definitely a welcome addition to our training toolbox.

It’s seemed like a long time coming but we finally did our last training session before we start the two week taper before the first competition of the season. I don’t necessarily need to taper for a 48km ride but I wanted to practice the routine with Estrid and get to know what works best for her.

We did a lovely 20km ride, we had planned to do this on Cannock chase, but unfortunately my van is in need of repair and waiting on parts so I didn’t have a tow vehicle (fingers crossed it’s ready in time). So we just did the best we could from home, which is more road work than I would have liked but the sun was shining and we enjoyed a slightly slower paced training session.

We did 1hr 20 of walk, 45mins of trot and 4minutes of canter. I would have liked to have the walk and trot the opposite way around but we have to work with the situation we find ourselves in, and I wasn’t about to pound out miles and miles of road in trot so our average speed was 8.7kph. Now I’ll have 4 5km hacks, one schooling session and one water treadmill left before we, hopefully, get our 2025 season underway!

We’ve had the dentist, the vet out for vaccinations (and uploaded them onto the EGB website), we’ve had the Physio, the farrier has been and Estrid has new shoes after a winter barefoot, I’ve had the tow vehicle serviced, we’ve entered our first ride and have been consistently training, so having Reactor panel out to check our saddle fit felt like the last piece of the preparation puzzle before we let fate decided if we make it to our first competition of 2025!

They very excitingly bought along their new saddle designs and the new panel system for me to see as I’m tentatively thinking about getting a new saddle if we start to up the distance. I’m particularly excited about the new panel system and not having to rely on velcro for the placements of the panels.

I love my current saddle but the stirrup bars are a little forward for my liking so I was keen to try something different. I still hate knee rolls but the saddle I tried had the softest, comfiest seat I have ever placed my butt on in my whole life! I think my choice is going to be the new panel system with a dressage tree (for the stirrup bar placement) and a GP/ more traditional cut with knee blocks I can take out… well that’s what I dream of when I don’t think about my bank balance!

Tissy is having January/February off but as much as she would like to be entirely feral I do like to put some effort into keeping her in a moderately presentable state. As we live on clay the greys get a pinky roan beige tint and there comes a point where I wonder if their tails will ever be white again.

Tissy’s days consist of mooching in the field, then catapulting to the gate as soon as she hears my arrival, yelling at me to hurry up and get her in for food time, eating kilos of mash in her stable and then going back out.

Seeing as it was also trim day I thought we’d put a little extra effort in for a groom and mane & tail wash. She’s looking pretty good this winter and I’m excited to start riding her again in march and hopefully taking her out to a few pony parties.

If we could get the jobs we wanted Dan and I would move to Wales in a heart beat. You can’t beat the terrain, the opportunities for adventure, the wilderness, solitude and beauty, even in the wind and rain. We popped back to my childhood home so that I could ride in the mountains and so we could begin our training for multiday hiking/backpacking.

Unfortunately the weather wasn’t on my side for riding. I don’t mind riding in winds up to 20mph but over that and it starts to get a bit extreme, add sideways rain and unstable trees from previous storms and it gets dangerous in the forests. So we only managed a short hack but it was still good for the soul.

Luckily the weather improved for our 32km overnight hike to a bothy up in the Cambrian mountains. We’re training for a 100mile hike in Scotland towards the end of the year and a two week hike in Nepal next year. It was so nice to see the mountains I grew up with from a different view point and there’s something that’s just so good for the brain and heart about going back to basics and being out in the relative wilderness. I’d love to do an overnight ride/camp like this with Estrid so I might start researching bothy’s with corrals? Do they exist?

It’s hard to find good going around me that isn’t stony track in winter so the gallops make a great option to actually get some continuous work in. I only start with 10km with a 50/50 split walk/trot and a tiny bit of canter thrown in for fun. I will steadily increase the canter and reduce the walk so that were getting up to 20km but I don’t like to do more than an hour of work on them, as the constant soft surface is pretty hard work on the soft tissue.

Still it’s nice to get out and start to focus more on cardiovascular fitness and stamina as the season approaches. I’m not sure we’ll get the opportunity to do an FEI ride this year with the uncertainty of our UK FEI ride schedule but hopefully we’ll be fit and ready if the opportunity comes our way.

If I lived near any hills, most my training would be on hills. Unfortunately we don’t have many in the midlands and the ones we do have aren’t very steep. At the start of any training block or after injury I utilise the one steep hill we do have that happens to be directly out from the yard. I don’t want to do too many sessions in the school a week, so in the winter this is an ideal alternative as our hacking isn’t very night time friendly from the yard.

I also really love doing this as I have to walk up and down the hill too, so it’s exercise for both of us. It’s only a 400m incline but we go up and down a few times and it takes about 40minutes before we’re both on the sweaty side.

I do this once a week for 6 weeks, then I add some trot pole work after or I start running up and walking down. After about 12 weeks, I have more daylight hours after work, and I swap this session for a ridden one of trailering out to somewhere for a decent hack.

I also find that doing non-ridden work is easier for me when I’m not feeling motivated. I don’t have to groom, I don’t have to tack up, there’s very little prep, it doesn’t take very long and it gives me some exercise too. I don’t usually struggle with getting sessions done but when it’s mainly dark and wet it’s good to have something easy to achieve.