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Here are some tips to helping you achieve the pace you want to ride successfully around your next cross country course. Plan your ride, know your speed to go the distance. Now you need to work out how you will ride that average speed. As you walk the course, try to get a sense of how it will flow and feel to ride. Where will you have to ride more slowly and where can you make up time. When you are galloping your horse along you will need to let them you know that a jump is approaching.

ThatHorse: Cruise Control: Adjusting Cross-Country Speed

Competed in the Wandin Horse trials in the Preliminary section on the last weekend in November. Saturday the weather was dry for the dressage. That was lucky as my farrier put new shoes on Compadre (Occy), unfortunately without studholes. The dressage test was ok, but nothing sparkling, especially after the Flowerbox incident at A, so we had to settle for 11th place after that phase. Up to the farriers that night and Occy had studholes by 8pm.

That was just as well as it rained overnight with the odd drizzle during the day. Even with the studs in we had a bit of a slip in the crosscountry warmup, but I had the best ride I ever had on Occy for the XC to come in clear and under time which moved us up to 2nd place.

We followed this up with a very nice and clear Showjumping round to stay in second place. The 1st place getter was about 15 points ahead, and as there is currently no way we could score in the high 70s for the dressage, we did as well as we could have, getting one of the 2 only clear clear rounds. Even the winner had time penalties Crosscountry. We scored a nice new Saddleblanket from Horseland for our troubles.