Barney Rubble - Morven Park - April ‘23

This is a video for the Barney Rubble Syndicate. Well, guys, we've been back in Pennsylvania for about three weeks. Barney's been settling in very, very well. He's happy to be home. And today we took him down to the open preliminary horse trials in Leesburg, Virginia, called Morven Park. If you remember, our last event was at Pine Top in Georgia where we tackled a massive open inter and I really felt like Barney was a little bit out of his depth there. It was a massive course and I thought it'd be good for him just to do a couple of easy prelims. And he was very, very good today. He did a dressage test very, very early this morning and it was less than ideal conditions for Barney. It was cold, it was windy. But to Barney's credit, he kept it together well. Since being back in Pennsylvania, Silver been schooling him a little bit on the flat for me. She's been just working at trying to get him a little bit weighting. He's a very big mover and trying to get him to sort of slow down and not be too sort of gung ho and forward. So lots of half halts and a lot of balancing exercises. And jumping wise, it's a. He's a really strange horse to jump where we're trying to teach him to jump lower. He just paddle pults off the floor, which is usually what we're trying to get all the other horses to do. But Barney actually jumps a bit too high. So basically trying to get him to level out his jump. And he was a good boy this weekend. Like I said before, Pine Topper felt like he was very, very green and a little bit nervous when we did the open intermediate and this was easy peasy. Today at Morven park, we scored a 30 in the dressage, which was about right. Obviously we could get a way better score at these competitions where we arrive the day before and do the arena familiarization. But these sort of domestic, you know, one day events where you do the dressage, show jumping, cross country is more about sort of giving them an outing and a run. And then when we take on the really important ones, obviously we try and get it. Get him there a day early or a date two days early and get him settled in and, you know, relaxation's the key to get his best work. You can see him there in the walk, looking off to the other horses in the other ring and it's all these. He loses his attention pretty quick. Old Barney, I love him. He's. He's tricky, but he's everything I Dream of in a horse. He's a big mover, he's fancy, he's flashy and he just oozes with natural talent. So he's still very green. You know, I was thinking today sometimes he's a bit of a hard horse to judge because he jumps so big. I mean we could jump him over a meter 40 jump no problem. But he's actually, he doesn't have that much experience. So I think our biggest goal over the sort of next period of his training is to just keep schooling him and educating him. I do think he's a horse of a lifetime but he's going to take a little bit of time. I think our next event is going to be at Fair hill. I'm tempted to go intermediate but part of me. Fair Hill will be a little bit harder than this event. So maybe we'll put him in the two star short there which should be somewhere between prelim and intermediate. Give him a good run. So I was quite pleased with his jumping today. Sort of over jumping. He nearly jumped me out of the tack on. On one fence. You'll see in a minute. But he, if you remember at his last event he was sort of looking around and not concentrating and here I felt like he gave me a good round. I think this is the jump where he jumped massive and I nearly lost my balance. Got him back under control. Pretty quick. Thinking this summer going to take him to a lot of jumping shows. He still lights up in the, in the ring a bit. He still gets, you know, in the warm up and in training at home he's quite relaxed and calm and then at the competition, once you go in the ring he fires up a bit too much. So I think during the summer months we've got a lot of good show jumping shows where we can just take him in class after class. He's one of the best jumpers I've ever sat on. He's brilliant. Obviously I love to get him where he drops his neck and sort of stretches his back and once he gets a bit excited he gets a bit hollow. But he put in a good round. I think I wasn't too worried about the result today. I think he finished third a couple seconds over the time cross country. But my goal in the cross country here was to give him a confident round. The key with him is to really try and jump the fences out of stride and get him relaxed on the landing side of the fence. He jumps really big and then he almost gives himself a fright. He tears off a bit afterwards but he was very confident, relaxed the whole way around the course and I'm just very pleased with the feeling he gave me. So next event will be in three weeks time at Fairhill. Using these sort of events to gain experience and mileage and he sort of. I need to train him at the events where he. At schooling I can get him quite relaxed and chill, but here in the competition he really gets fired up. So I've sort of got a. It's good to be competitive, but I also want to try and teach him to be just as relax at the showers here at home. But very, very pleased with the run we had this weekend and he seems in great health and I think it's going to be a good year, a good building year.