For my 21st birthday last year I got a voucher for a flat, jump or arena cross country lesson with eventer Victoria Bax at her yard, which is near where I was for University. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Victoria Bax, she has competed at CIC2* level and specialises in retraining ex racehorses. So she was a great person to have a lesson with!
Our lesson was great! Scottie wasn’t fazed at all by going somewhere new by himself. He didn’t even really look at the banners and mirrors in the school- which surprised me! He quickly started working nicely and round before we started working over poles in trot and canter.
I haven’t done any grid work with Scottie really, so it did us both a lot of good working up and down this line of poles with jumps going up and down. We started off with one cross pole in the middle of the grid and built up to three cross poles in the grid. Scottie coped with it all well, but it took him a few awkward attempts for him to work out what he was meant to be doing!
This is our first attempt of the 3 cross poles:
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But he quickly sorted his feet and mind out and got it, although he had a pole down:
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We then worked on 2 fences through the grid, eventually having 2 spreads in the grid. Scottie jumped them great!
The only real problems we had when something was new ad Scottie wasn’t sure what he was meant to be doing and I was too slow to just push him on. We need to work on strengthening our canter and do lots of canter poles to encourage him to reach as Victoria believes if there hadn’t been the canter poles in the grid we would have been putting an extra stride in.
* All photos were taken by Jason Bax of Equuis Photography, Husband of Victoria Bax. *
Last Updated on 14/01/2022
Wow, the angle of that picture makes the jump look enormous! Lessons with pros are so much fun.
I can’t work out how big they were! Cos they felt hug, but Scottie was jumping bigger than he needed to!
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