Grace is at Boot Camp

Grace and I have endured another tough couple of months. I have not really written anything on this blog because I have felt really negative about our future for various reasons.

I moved all three horses to a fantastic competition yard called Northcote Stud in September, but after a few lovely months there the travelling became too much for me. The yard was 30 minutes from home and a whopping 60 minutes from work on the motorway so I was spending two and a half hours in the car every day and driving over 105 miles! As a result, my riding started to suffer as I had less and less time for riding, competitions and lessons and was constantly rushing around trying to get everything done!

In October she also had her sacroiliac medicated because the PSD had caused some strain through her way of going. Peter Scholefield assured me that it was very common following the injury and she should not require any further treatment. I plan on taking her back in the spring just to have everything checked over, but fingers crossed there will be nothing wrong!

At the beginning of December I moved all three horses to a small part livery yard just ten minutes from home... Bliss!

However, true to form as we moved Grace became really poorly. The day after the move I got to the yard to find her absolutely streaming with snot, coughing and not eating! I called the vet out immediately as she had been fine the previous day and I was embarrassed that I had moved her onto a new yard with foals and mares in foal when she was so bad.

The vet took some swabs and gave her some bute. She did not want to give her antibiotics as it can cause them to become a carrier if it is certain strains of bacteria and until she knew what it was she did not want to treat it. But Grace got gradually worse and the vet had to come out again to administer more pain relief as she simply was not eating! The swabs came back to show she had a nasty bacterial infection in her upper respiratory, but I was instructed to leave it to work its way out, which I did.

Finally the week before Christmas the snot stopped and she looked brighter and back to her old self! What a relief!

Because I have not been able to really get going with hers, I have sent both Hannah and Grace to Jo Wright-Graham, or ‘Boot Camp’ as I call it, for three weeks while I am away on holiday! I have been getting some good reports about Grace via text message, and other than a small blip when the eggbar was digging into her frog (Jo’s farrier has given her a new set of shoes) she seems to have been working well. She finds it difficult sitting back on her hinds, but she is still not strong enough to fully take the weight behind yet, and hopefully as she starts to strengthen up this will improve.

I am planning on picking the girls up on Monday afternoon and have booked a lesson on the two of them in order to get myself up to speed with what they have been doing and I am going to watch Jo ride first. I have given myself a good kick up the bottom and sent off a few competition entries before I came away. Grace’s first one is at Aintree on 24th January doing the two Prelims, and then I have booked her in for two more Prelims at Croft on 6th February. We have a busy few months ahead!