Sky (almost) goes jumping.....

So yesterday we took Sky for her first jumping lesson with the instructor that coaches the team at Ali's school. The venue was 5 miles away from the yard so Ali rode her there and I followed in the car, like we used to do in France.

Was going to hack over with her but G is pretty slow these days, took him out with Tari on the lead on Friday and he ambled along taking about 20 minutes to do a mile.......so we decided to get Sky to do it alone. Good experience for her anyway.......

She did her usual trick of following the car, so they trotted most of the way. She was pretty good considering that's the furthest she's ever been on her own and she had to negotiate some main roads......

When we got there, the usual shiny clean booted & rugged horses were being unloaded from trailers. Sky neighed at them but was cool with it all. She went off into the arena and did what she was asked - to start with, at least. Trotting poles, yeah, fine:

Small cross poles, well OK, if I must:

But anything bigger? Erm, no, thanks!!

You want me to do what?!!

 

The other big shiny horses were by this time flying over some rather large jumps but Sky just decided she didn't want to play any more. So we left it at that. The instructor suggested we hire an arena and have a couple of private lessons to start with. Might look in to that, as there's a closer arena that's nicer to hack to. This one was right next to the M5 which makes it very noisy!

 

There are a couple of cross country training days coming up, which I reckon Sky would prefer, since she's always happy to gallop around and pop a log out hacking. The problem with poles is she knows she can knock them over. But of course the X country venue is too far away to hack to.

 

Sky hacked home in record time, took her under an hour to do the 5 miles. As it was all roadwork, that didn't involve any cantering. And her heart rate wasn't too high when she'd finished. So maybe she'd prefer to do endurance?