Lodestar Eventing

“Yep, this is about warm enough”

I am a firm believer that horses should be treated as horse, not expensive china, and should be turned out in all weathers and at all times of year. Obviously you need to rug it appropriately, but restricting turn out to protect “my little precious” is not my ethos.

However it turns out that oh-so-tough Irish hunter, Monster, also has a caveat, and that is “but only if the horse wants to go out”.

Ever since I got this creature, born and raised on the Emerald Isle, a land not noted for it’s dryness she has hated rain or cold and has been a bit, ahem, wet, about staying out.

As we are now in one of the wettest winters since horse-ownership began turn-out has already been heavily restricted, but it now transpires that even two hours twice a week is too much for her to bear. She is obviously pacing to come in, and twice now I have brought her in with minor lameness. The irony is that this has caused her to miss two weekends hunting, which she longs to do whatever the weather.

Whatever my opinion on winter turn out that of the horse must come first, and if Monster wants to stay in, then she can stay in.

Hunt buttons are awarded for services to the hunt. I received mine last night from the Vale of Lune Harriers for my work on the hunt website. Those readers who hunt will appreciate how proud I am of this.

Ever since Monster and I (grammer) had a jumping lesson from Geoff Billington a few years ago Kirsty has always referred to him as “my mate Geoff”.

Lat night I got to see “my mate Geoff” again as part of the Champions Tour, a show by Geoff and Oli Townend.

Now those of you who have ever been lucky enough to see Geoff commentating or jumping will know that any show involving Geoff will not be disappointing. For all his messing about and spoofing of other riders you know that he has the ablities to match the showmanship. I loved the casual way he placed a pint of Guinness on the puissance wall in Dublin, jumped the wall, then collected his, unspilled, pint.

So you pretty much expect to see Geoff messing about and interrupting Oli.

Oli on the other hand was an unkown quantity to me. I expected from what I’d seen on TV that he’d be a nice lad with an ablity to play up to the crowd. And so it proved.

What I didn’t expect to see was a sense of humour as sharp as Geoffs. Not only did Oli manage to get his own back, but at one point as well as having the crowd in stitches he actually managed to have Geoff corpsing. I’ll not spoil things for those who are going by giving things away, except to say that this is possibly the funniest riders tour you’ll ever see, while still coming away learning some useful tips.

The Champions Tour – go see it.

Two Wheels

I recently had a day of mountain bike skills training with Ed Oxley of Great Rock.

[Image copyright and courtesy Ed Oxley]

A lot of what I had to learn was about fore/aft balance and how, for too long I’ve been leaning too far off the back of the bike. I had to learn to have my weight forward, and shift it back at the right point.

Sound familiar?

It should do.

The impact on my horse-riding has been immediately noticeable.

Four Legs

[Image copyright and courtesy Hooves-R-Us]

No longer worried about my position I’m now able to better judge if Monster will be overfaced, and I’m not unbalancing her. This season she is really coming on.

We recently designed and built a new website for local farrier Paul Conway.

Hooves-R-Us New Website