Autumn is definitely just around the corner (actually here, although I refuse to acknowledge it). It’s actually my favourite season but one that I find the hardest to manage in terms of the horses diet and weights.

The grass is short and sugary from all the rain, sunshine and heat and they move onto new winter paddocks in October, with lush untouched grass. Their training reduces in intensity so they don’t need as much hard feed either. I usually feed more hard feed over the Spring/Summer months due to the training load and more fibre/forage over the Autumn winter. I use Feed XL to make sure they’re having a balanced diet so around now I start the slow reduction of mix or cubes, icrease the fibre beet & sugar beet alongside switching to a lo-cal balancer, that essentially just has less protein than my usual balancer. I love the full feed bin feeling and the prepping for winter.

Roo in his rehab and 6 weeks of walking has put on a bit of weight, on literally the bare minimum to hit his daily requirements. So I’m hoping that he continues to improve and we can get a bit more work in as we switch to the winter fields. I’m finding it a little harder to motivate myself with rehab at the end of a season. A bit of me wants to just wait until next year and let him sit in a field over autumn and some of winter, but it needs to be done and once he gets to a certain fitness level I will give him, and me, some time off over winter.

I look forward to the year where all the horses have a good season, a scheduled autumn break and come into work at the end of December…..haha! I can dream! I always found having 10 weeks off proper training so good for my future motivation, Tissy would have October, November and a couple of weeks in December off. I would still go on the odd hack here or there but not riding very much always gave me the bug and drive back for the season ahead.

The last few years I’ve been in a perpetual cycle of train, rehab, train, rehab and it would be nice to schedule the rest and plan when I want to put the work in but that’s horses for you! Tissy was a unicorn who only missed one Plan A season her entire life!

I’ve ridden around Carsington water a few times and it’s been lovely so with Kirk Ireton just around the corner I thought it would be a good outing for Tissy. I obviously had not correctly remembered the hills! Luckily Tissy is the hill queen, she can go up and down with ease at an astonishing speed even at 24.

This would be an excellent training ground for The Golden Horsehoe or in preparation for Red Dragon. We were accompanied with Izzy and Fluffy, another livery at our yard, and we had a nice steady ride out at 8kph over 23km. Elevation was 160m from lowest to the highest point, and we totaled 7 climbs. The course was very heavy on the road work, putting my hoof boots to the test, and they definitely passed, I think I need to get her some back ones as her hind feet were a bit sore the next day. But the lovely stretches of field, the views and variation in inclines/declines still made for an enjoyable and interesting ride.

I’d really like to become better acquainted with the Peak district bridleways. I don’t live far away and it would be great to incorporate some decent hills into our training. It would be a dream to move that way, as close to Welsh hills as I’ll get in the Midlands that’s for sure.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever grow out of the horsey phase, every time I go past a horse in the car and someone is with me I’ll go ‘Look a horse’, if we’re on a walk and a horse comes up to us I’ll spend ages giving it pats and telling it how lovely it is. I’m forever being reminded ‘You know you have 3 of these at home right?’.

I just love them, I love the life I have because of them. I love that I spend hours a day outside, that I have a responsibility that I can’t duck out of, if I don’t want to go to the gym at 6am, I hit snooze and don’t go. If I have to be up at 5am to put Tissy out in winter I will do it without fail every single day. I mean that also has a flip side if you’re not feeling great, you just want to hide on the sofa, you have no choice but to go out and do the chores but I never regret the time spent at the yard.

Going to Belvoir Castle’s Festival of the Horse was so much fun. From quadrille, classic dressage and trick riding to knights and tiny ponies in the scurry. It was wonderful to have a public moment remembering and saluting The Queen. It was great to see horses doing so many different activities, displaying their versatility and also constantly wondering why an animal so large gives us all they’ve got and are so loyal, loving and trainable.

I thoroughly enjoyed the mischievous Belvoir hounds, who were running around creating chaos, stealing burgers but my highlight has to be Ben Atkinson and his team. The stunt riders were incredible and I’d really love to have a go but his liberty act stole the show. How anyone can ask 9 horses to do different things in a huge grass arena without any tack is beyond me. What I enjoyed even more was watching when things didn’t entirely go to plan, how he asked the horses to come back and do as he wanted, there was such a sense of conversation between him and them. They were doing it because they could and they wanted to but you knew that they always had the option to say no, to just walk off, it was an extraordinary atmosphere.

I have been backing Estrid since May, so after 5 months of walk with the odd short trot here and there over the last month I though it was time to try out a bit of canter. I personally don’t like doing a first canter in a school or confined space, I think that turning at canter is firmly in the realms of more experienced, better balanced and muscled horses. So every time I back a horse their first canter is on a hack. I prefer on grass, purely for a soft place to land if it gets a bit spicy.

In an ideal world I like it to be a natural decision/choice of the horse. So Emma very kindly accompanied us on a hack with Diego as babysitter and canter instigator!

The plan was that Emma & Diego would go into canter up a grassy bridleway and Estrid could decide to follow or not. I haven’t taught her any canter aids yet, voice, leg or seat so this was purely up to her.

After playing with a few strides of her fastest trot, fumbling around for another two strides between canter and trot she then struck off into a glidey, controlled, beautiful canter. She didn’t pull, she didn’t bronc, she didn’t charge off, she came back to a trot without being hyped up and with me barely having to ask she came back to a nice sedate walk.

It couldn’t have gone better!

I love this phase. Where you expect nothing so are constantly delighted by every new experience that goes well. I try to do everything in hand first before then following up with the same experience ridden. This week I wanted to do a few first with Estrid, she hadn’t traveled in the lorry since we bought her….an oversight on my part, I probably should have done this much sooner. But I have been practice loading her regularly and letting her stand on the box open or closed to get used to it. So I wanted to take her out in the lorry, unload her and re-load her somewhere new, as I feel it’s usually the loading somewhere different when there’s other stuff going on that normally catches people out.

I also wanted to get her used to water, as to my knowledge she’s never been through a river or in a pond. Estrid HATES water, when it rains she’s super cross about it, she hates being cooled off in the hot weather and she only just tolerates being sponged down if she’s sweaty. So I thought going through water might be a bit of a battle.

One evening after work I decided to box her up and go to our local wood, a nice enclosed area that didn’t require going on any road or encountering traffic. Our aims were:

1. Load and travel
2. Stand on the box
3. Stand tied up to the box
4. .Listen to commands when walking through the woods
5. Go through a river

I must say I was amazed at how well it all went. It’s rare that I ever have a day with horses where every little thing goes right, where I just feel pure joy and accomplishment. She loaded without hesitation, she traveled well, she stood on the box without fuss, she stood tied up to the lorry without pulling back or getting stressed, even when I hid around the corner. She was enthusiastic and forward for our walk listening intently the whole time, but most surprising she went in and out of water with no problem at all.

Three weeks sound, yaaaaaay! Roo spent 6 weeks recovering from his injury when he trotted up sound, I gave him another 3 weeks field rest and now he’s ready to start his rehab. He’s actually feeling pretty well and is back to his usual self.

My loose plan is to do about 8 weeks work with him, then give him 6 weeks off before re-starting his fitness work for next season. But that all depends on how his rehab goes really. In the meantime we have the usual hill walks, raised poles and lots of hock and bum building work to do.

I love it when a moment happens that proves to you that your training has paid off. On Estrid’s first solo hack my goal was to stay calm, keep asking until it happens and to jump off and walk with her if we weren’t getting anywhere in a positive way.

I hadn’t been getting on using the stirrup, Dan has built two very tall mounting blocks at the yard so I just kind of step over to mount. So as well as tackling our first solo ride out I also wanted to start putting my foot in the stirrup as I got on.

I have done a fair bit of mounting practice with Estrid, my method was to stand her next to the mounting block, dance around, jump up and down, sing, tap her from all angles, mess around with the saddle and generally make lots of noise. If she stayed still then that was the end of our session (sometimes that meant it was literally 1 minute long), if she moved we had to walk in a circle and then try again. My thought process for this is simple, stand still = you don’t have to do any work, move and you’ll have to walk around. I stole the method from a Warwick Schiller video. I also like to line her up then let go, move around her, give her a scratch, move away and then if she stays still throughout I’ll get on. I stole this from Cameron Beer when I watched him teach a lesson and the horse kept moving away from the mounting block.

So in theory I should be able to transfer this training to any environment. Estrid was impeccable for her first hack, even strolling past Tissy and Roo in the field over the hedge without any fuss. But we did encounter the same problem we initially had in the school, we got stuck in the mud. When Estrid is unsure she just plants herself, I don’t want to pony club kick her or make her dead to my leg so I try for a couple of minutes, and then I just jumped off and led her past whatever she was unsure of.

But because I’ve never mounted from the ground or even used the stirrup I wasn’t 100% sure if we would be able to get back on. I was pretty confident in my mounting training so I found a gate, set her up, climbed up on the gate and got back on. We did this twice over the course of a mile. I was so proud of her for transferring these skills into a different situation and environment. Now to work on moving forward….which I think will come with a bit more experience, confidence and time.

This was my first time attending a ride organised by Sport Endurance. I really wanted to do a pleasure ride with Tissy in August and Sunday the 7th was my only free day. All the EGB rides were either on the Saturday or already full, so I went on the hunt for other options.

Tissy isn’t that fussed about going out hacking from home but she absolutely adores new places and going out out. My mission with Tissy is to do 3 ‘new’ to us pleasure rides a year for as long as she enjoys it and is able. I know that doesn’t sound like many but for each ride I like to have had her in 6 weeks ‘training’ (just being consistently ridden 2-3x a week), so that’s 3 and a half months of riding her regularly. If I ride her regularly she loses weight so I have to make sure there’s enough grass (she can’t chew hay) to counteract that, so really I can only really get away with riding her from May to October when we have plenty of grazing. I then like to give her plenty of time off between each 6 week block, so by design 3 rides is what’s achievable for us.

Hoveringham was a lovely little outing on a beautiful sunny day. The ground was rock solid but Tissy was flying in her hoof boots and didn’t slip at all, which I was quite pleased about. We had some lovely company in Rosie and her Haflinger Tilly as we cantered along the river Trent watching the cruisers chug on by. Thank you to the organisers and all their helpers for a lovely day.

We even got a rosette, carrots and some crisps and juice at the end of our ride. I’d really like to get to Long Mynd next year and maybe the Wirral, what would you recommend we tick off our Pleasure rides list?

Considering I have had horses for 29 years and I currently own three, when I recently had to move everything, I thought, I don’t think I actually have that much stuff. I could fit everything I own for my ponies in one 3.5t lorry trip without playing the jenga packing squeeze game. That includes my rug boxes, feed bins, tack, hay feeders, everything I own for them! Then I wondered is this normal? Do I actually have a lot of stuff compared to others, or less stuff? What’s your verdict?

I had to move all my crew kit, rug boxes and spares boxes from where they were stored in the barn at the livery to a loft above my stable. Although the loft took some cleaning and it was a mission getting everything up there, I actually really love my little organised space. Plus, I could definitely put a camp bed up there and sleep above Tissy in the winter! Haha!

I love being able to do ‘non-horsey’ things. I really enjoy the outdoors, I enjoy having varied experiences, trying new things and just generally having fun. Horses have allowed me to experience so many things, taken me to places I would have never been otherwise and have shaped my entire life. But they have also limited me, time available to socialise, time and money for other activities, the responsibility of their care means that spontaneous trips away are difficult.

I wouldn’t change my life. I love my horses. But every now and again I wonder what it would have been like without them. I feel I have two conflicting wishes. Not doing FEI over the past 4 years has meant I haven’t had to do as intensive training, which has freed up a lot of time for mountain biking, surfing, climbing, camping, hiking, painting, eating out…. the list goes on. My first wish is to race at FEI level again, my second is to spend more time on non-horsey pursuits. Are they mutually exlusive, no I dont think so, however, I think to really achieve both I can’t have a string of horses, at most two competing and still have time (and the money) for other hobbies.

So although to race successfully at FEI I would be more likely to achieve this goal by having multiple horses and dedicating all my time to their training, I feel I am compromising this dream by putting time and energy into other things that make me happy. In theory I would say this is better balance and would result in better mental health, but I also don’t want to look back and regret not giving it 100%. I guess it will all come down to acceptance, balance, figuiring out what my priorities are and being confident in executing them.