It has been an interesting and mixed journey with Socks, as with all young horses it is never easy and can take varying lengths of time with each horse but I can honestly say you never stop learning... or have the occasional day where you feel like giving up! The progress has been a lot slower than I would have liked, lots of hurdles thrown in the way, my confidence, patience and ability tested but we are now on the road to start progressing through the levels. If you had said to me a few years ago I'd be so pleased to be able to walk trot and canter and stay in an arena I'd have thought you were mad but right now I feel like I've accomplished Mount Everest!
A catch up on the year so far part one - Guinea pigs and freestyling
As Socks has a phobia of white boards in indoor schools, either seen on their own are fine but not together, we took the opportunity to be a guinea pig for students training for their UKCC exam. After ten minutes working in wobbling on an inner track we managed to convince Socks that she was not going to be attacked and she settled down to be a model guinea pig, there was only a slight hiccup on the first canter where she briefly gate crashed the lesson at the other end of the arena trying to show off how high her hind legs could stretch, quite far actually!
Our second appearance as guinea pigs was for a judge upgrade exam, also our first attempt at Novice 30, what could go wrong? Hmmmm well it seems little Socks does love to perform to an audience we just need to sit down and have a chat about the content she includes. Our warm up went really well and turning down the centre line to a line of 7 judges cars all watching didn't phase Socks at all, in fact the test was going better than I expected, that was until the first medium canter when Socks decided to go freestyle! A brief panic when we seemed to be running out of arena to defuse the situation meant we got our first 2 followed by a 3 and a 4 after which I finally regained control and we were back up to 7's and totally mortified, but as was pointed out to me at least I made them use a range of marks!!!
I can't be too cross at Socks though as it was her first competition of the year and she recomposed herself to carry on to complete the test which is a huge step forward and it won't be long until those disobediences fizzle out. Until then we will just have to keep going out for experience as every time it's getting better and better.
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