With my Mitsubishi Motors Badminton Horse Trials ride Uptons Who not out competing last weekend, it was the turn of some of the other horses, with two running at Oasby on Friday, FEI event pony Rocksoxs in the novice and Pharlys Crown Pegasus in the BE100 — they went really well, coming in the top 10 in both sections.
Uptons Who (“Joe”), on the other hand, went to the gallops again the day before and then was back in Yorkshire early Sunday morning for some more dressage training. After a 2.30am start on Friday and a 5am start on Sunday, we were in desperate need of some Red Bull for the journey, along with my a few classics from my iPod. And after a good lesson, I have few more things to work on over the next few weeks leading up to Badminton.
On Monday it was another visit from the farrier Paul Conway — there’s just one more shoeing to go now before the big event, so that’ll be 10 days before we set off for Badminton. Also, we had a visit from our nutritionist Caroline Dickens from one of my longest standing sponsors, Baileys, to see Joe’s progress for this time of year. Joe is fed on Baileys Endurance mix and Baileys Outshine, along with his supplements from Maxavita.
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Caroline was really pleased with Joe’s condition — she has been working with us for many years now, giving the whole team great advice on how to get all our horses looking and feeling their best.
After Joe had been looked at by Caroline I was off to the gallops with him and “Fletch” (Guna B Good), where we upped the interval training for Joe to three lots of six minutes, including two pulls up the hill.
Badminton final scores
This week I have also been busy with some of my young horses, part of the Shadow Enterprise. Shadow Stone (left), a four-year-old I broke in at the end of last year has now been back in work for two weeks and he’s a very exciting prospect for the future.
We have also had an update from Profile Coach Builders, the horsebox company building our fantastic new lorry hopefully in time for the big day! It looks amazing (above and right), thank you so much everyone at Profile.
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Our next event is this weekend at Lincoln Horse Trials, with Joe running on Sunday in the open intermediate. So I hope we will have lots of good things to report.
Till then,
Best regards,
Ben
Ben will be blogging on www.horseandhound.co.uk every week in the build-up to his first Badminton, so check back next week to read more.
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