Solihull Novice

Had some fab news driving up to the event in a text from Kirtsy Cocks who I coach, she had finished 4th in the 100, a fab result. I have trained Kirsty for over ten years, she has owned her lovely horse Charlie since she bought him off me as a very green youngster. Kirsty is now able to focus on eventing properly having qualified as a physio last summer, for the last few years her eventing has been squeezed in when she's home from college.
This is always a good event to upgrade a Novice horse at as it's a short XC course and usually straightforward. Monty has just had a couple of weeks off to recover from a minor injury and so we decided to withdraw from Rockingham 2* and instead run here as he had lost some of his fitness.

I had really late times, evening eventing!!! Monty's dressage was good (could have been better) but he was in the top ten. Show Jumping was interesting, he was very forward and over fresh warming up. The SJ arena at Solihull is right next to the water jump, which was unlucky for me! As I cantered to turn into fence 1 someone went through the water jump.........Monty adores XC and couldn't believe his eyes, he took off XC speed into fence 1 and that's really how the rest of my round went. I felt like a rag doll, struggling to turn him and with no rhythm at all = 3 down.
The XC had been beefed up in places with some tough new technical fences, but it just wasn't big enough for him and he felt like he just hurtled round it, we saw some fab gallopy strides though which felt like we were flying, they had added some super new hedges into the course.

The Novice shared a 100 technical fence at 12, a rail on one stride to a ditch, it was far too small for bold Monty, I set up really well to it but still he bounced it. There was an accutley angled skinny brush at fence 4 at the top of a very steep narrow path which caused trouble all day, it didn't help that the footing on the slope up to it was getting inconsistent epecially if u wanted to go on the grass to get a better line, the roll top into the water was a decent size but there was an alternative. It was a shame there was no long route at the very narrow tall looking skinny at 10b, many were E here, it was on a curving line with the (a) element also being tall and skinny.
Here is Monty jumping the last few fences including the water.
Photo above of fence 4 by kind permission of www.shoestringeventing.co.uk A fab website where u can walk most of the UK BE courses online.

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