This has been a busy end of the year for Galahad – from no shows at all we have been to several in the past few weeks – at least virtually! The latest was the British Riding Clubs’ Christmas Cracker online dressage competition.
Given our lack of practice over the summer, the sogginess of the field and Galahad’s reluctance to canter on such wet ground I had intended to enter the intro level test as an easier re-introduction fo us. Sadly I realised that my one novice level test (not on Galahad) last year disqualified me from that class so I ended up doing the prelim riding test instead. I had never done a riding test before so I wasn’t quite sure how it would go but as I was expecting our performance to be somewhat under par anyway I wasn’t too worried and just gave it a go.
It definitely was not our best effort – Galahad was very reluctant to go near the wettest part of the field and it really showed in the test. On the other hand, we hadn’t ridden a whole dressage test for a year and we had fun trying so it was still a good experience for us. When the results came through we had scored 65% which considering everything was not a bad effort. We ended up coming 18th in the class – not brilliant but not last!

I had a lot of fun filming the test and I will definitely be entering more online competitions in the future. Hopefully the ground will dry out a bit before then though!