Continuing the Journey ...

Well time is running out bit for this year in my journey to improve my confidence as soon the horrible weather will be back and horses will be back in at night.  

Decided to go again to Danethorpe with the intention of pushing to do the next level jumps.  I dont know what happened but my nerves just got the better of me.  Luckily once we had gone through the wood land trial with Lauren shouting encouragement at me we improved slightly but didnt really get my act together and so really felt it Monday and in fact Tuesday - felt I had been steam rollered.  Probably sitting too tense and gripping!

Sadie was due to have some dental work done and I toyed with going bitless but after a practice session decided it was just not safe.  She was fine but towards the end was a little iffy and I tried really hard to just leave her head alone.  She is not a horse that jumps on washing line reins though and is in fact very green in her jumping as we found out trying to do the steps lol. 

I get so frustrated with myself as I know the horse can do it - all she wants is for me to tell her to do it and I just freeze.  I am shouting at myself in my head - sit up, hold her up and kick.  I dropped her at one and she hit the brakes and luckily Lauren quickly point out my mistake.  So what I am trying to do now is look at the positives and to be positive - we tried the bigger drop fence and did a few new jumps like the steps, the coffin and a few banks but afterwards I felt cross that were others that are calling me to jump them and I just chicken out.

So .... we have a hunter trial planned for October and one more practice session before that to give myself a kick up the rear!  Maybe if I have a definite goal to work towards I might just pull myself together.

I have decided I need to jack my stirrups up a few holes and possibly get a gp / jumping saddle as the dressage and VSD saddle dont really help.

Hopefully this little clip of the coffin will work - she is normally very confident over ditches but we took a few trys to get it smooth - again she was probably feeding off my tenseness.

We played quite a bit in the water trotting through out over a small log and on to a slightly bigger log. She will jump out of water fine - but will not jump into water.

Trying to sort my knitting out on the steps lol :

she still wouldnt drop into the water and would slide along until she could jump off the corner.  She was getting a bit upset when I tried to push her so I left it at that.

Jumping out the water was no problem - although this picture makes me laugh as it looks like I was trying to lift her up lol.  She did eventually get the hang of it.