Another double dressage win for Freddie! and some leg yield practice to music!

15 June 2025

Freddie was a little superstar at the weekend. I haven't done dressage since March (remember the stoned beach donkey?) so I was a bit unsure about how it would pan out. We've been working REALLY bloody hard too in our practice.

The weekend was frantic - 6 hours of dressage writing nonstop on Saturday and then 4 hours of scoring on Sunday before tacking up to compete. I stopped scoring at 2.15 and was due “down the centreline” at 2.47 – not really enough time to get dressed, brush the pony, tack up and warm in so I went at the end of the class which gave me 14 more minutes!

The warm up arena was empty, so I literally just cantered around as quickly as I could - like a small child on a pony at a Shetland Grand National, but I guess we look like that anyway! - collected him into something sensible for dressage for a lap and then went down to the indoor arena to do the test.

You may recall that in our last dressage test in March, Fred was disappointed that there were no jumps and had as much finesse in his test as the bored beach donkeys from Weston-Super-mere, (Although it looks like I forgot to post about that!) so I was a little apprehensive as to whether this would be one of the Good, the bad or the Ugly!

I always say i never really know what Fred's opinion is going to be until I come down the centreline... But he gave me two good tests for a win in the Novice (out of 4) for 68.2% and scoring my FIRST EVER 70%+ score in his ele.

My highest of all time with all horses was 69.1 so I’ve FINALLY broken the 70% barrier!! I was the only person in my Trailblazers section, so obviously I took home the beautiful trailblazers first rosette – which is the HUGE pretty one in the first photo. Lots of carrots for Freddie that day!

So I guess this is now his third double double win. 😃 two now for dressage and one for SJ

I'm super chuffed to have got my Trailblazers Qualification, which I missed last year cos of covid.

In addition to the Trailblazers dressage champs spot (and an 80cm spot at Trailblazers SJ when he was 2nd out of 20 the other day), he's also qualified for Sunshine Tour Champs with both placings on Sunday meaning he now has 6 spots at Sunshine Tour - 2 x Ele spots, 1 x Novice spot, 1 x 75cm and 2x 80cm spots.

Go Freddie bear. As promised your holiday will be 13th Sept.... keep it up kid xx

The test in pictures

Novice 3

Ele 2

Leg yield to music

On Wednesday after writing for jayne, we had a lesson in the boards to work on some of the moves. loving this leg yield timed perfectly to my chosen music... whenever i do that!

And this is his gammy side!

And also my shoulder fore practice from May - again getting the gammy side, but it's still good.