Month Uno; 1/6

Please bare with me on this post, my one of hopefully many, monthly review posts as it might be a bit ropey to began with before I decide on how I want to work it! 

So, in order to see how we're progressing and to keep moving forwards, I need to keep a track of how things are going and so each month I intend to do one of these posts to see whereabouts we're at and what we need to work on. Reviewing our goals from last month seems a good place to start, so here we go... 

Our goals for July were...

Improve our schooling

• I feel we had a bit of a set back with this with him having just over a week off due to being lame but I have to admit the quality of his walk and canter work seems to have come on a hell of a lot and we even very occasionally have a glimpse of some hope in trot! No, he doesn't work in a consistent outline, but now when asked to he will in both walk and canter, I just don't particularly go out of my way to ask him to at the minute as I'm trying to work more on my position than him. But, yes, this goal is going in the direction I want it to and I'm going to keep it on as an underlying goal for the rest of the year, however at the moment it's not a huge red area!

                           

                             

                                                            (June last year)

                           

                                                           (July this year)

Start work on hacking

• And when I say start work, I mean be able to walk to the end of the drive and possibly off it, so we well and truly smashed this goal. I don't think we're quite ready to go off on a 10 mile trek just yet, but we can actually leave the drive now and do a hack of some form. It's going to take a hell off a lot of work to turn him into a happy hacker so again this is going to be an ongoing goal but I never thought I'd manage a half an hour hack at any point last month!! 

To loose some weight

• Well I think some comparison pictures will explain this better... he looks incredible at the moment; so that's a 3/3 on the goal front. 

                        

                                                          (21st June)

                       

                                               (27th July, ooooooooh pony)

I'm pretty happy with how all of the above have gone down, so here is the part of the blog where we just do a quick overview because, let's be honest, writing about the whole month would take way too long and would bore people to death. 

What did we get up to? 4 hacks, XC schooling, Greenacres 

How many times did he make me want to cry/scream/gouge my eyes out/write his advert/call up tescos/etc? Surprisingly just the once!

Best parts? Evening hack to Derrington, Greenacres; he actually made me happy cry that weekend!

Worst parts? Kicking me 

And finally, time for Augusts goals... 

• Crack the canter work! Carrying on with improving our schooling, I'm going to focus on one pace at a time and as canter is his strongest pace and the easiest to work with, this seems like a good place to start.
• More confidence and consistency hacking.
• Be more patient;this one's for me!

Beth & Jack x